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The outspoken wet in a dry, dry Liberal Party was fronting the official celebrations for this week's centenary of female suffrage. This was a nice touch from a party that has a leader who believes that the most effective way of combating unemployment is to keep women in the home. Still, in Amanda, we have living proof that its not just stylish women who get ahead in the Liberal Party.
The event bought together women from all sides of politics for a group hug and the opportunity to have Vanstone lecture them on the Liberal's laissez faire approach to getting women into Parliament. Her line is that Labor's quotas system - despite increasing female MPs from less than 10 per cent to 30 per cent in a decade - is actually demeaning to women. Instead, Vanstone advocates the Liberal approach of putting advertisements in newspapers trying to drum up interest in the glamorous life of a party hack. What she doesn't explain is that this is the strategy that drew Pauline Hanson into public life. Lesson, your recruitment materials should not end up wrapping fish and chips.
But back to those week's 'celebration' of suffrage. To mark the occasion one would have expected some sort of ground-breaking announcement that casts the battle of equality forward to deal with the complexities of the modern world. Paid maternity perhaps? Or affordable workplace childcare? A system of industrial laws that provide security to families? So what did Amanda come up with? A major public artwork to commemorate the sisterhood. Now we at Workers online have nothing against the yarts, but to hold this out as a tangible recognition of the suffragettes is an insult nto the political pioneers who paved the way for people like Vanstone to enter public life.
Then again, insults to the sisterhood seem to be her stock in trade. Take her 'radical plan' to overhaul the welfare system that she's cooked up with the Mad Monk. The idea is to knock thousands of social security and get them back onto the 'employment' list so they can access the more arduous unemployment benefits. The plight of the permanently impaired is a real one, but to simply cut back the support for the most needy in society has just one effect -shifting the onus of care back to their families - and in particular to women.
And who could forget her time as Education Minister, when she promoted the spread of full fees, on the grounds that allowing students to "invest in themselves" was policy in the interests of low-income families. Her stewardship of the portfolio, also led to her being immortalised in the book ' Cooking With Australian Nuts' by noted Ipswich
chef Bernard a la King Dowling .The Amanda Vanstone Lettuce Salad (which has gone a tad stale since last weekend) Take four lettuce leaves and feed them to students and the unemployed. (Serves 4). Thoroughly abuse anyone who has not enough money to put decent food on the table or who blow all their income on food and rent rather than sending their children to private schools.
Like all Liberal Party initiatives it all comes down to one issue: money. Their's is a philosophy that works for those who already have the power in society by starting with a notion of equality that ignores the vast gulf in opportunity that has already existed. So the son of a millionaire should have exactly the same opportunities as the daughter of a single mum on welfare and any policy setting that attempts to help the latter along is an affront to the free market. When you look at the powerful through a gender lens it doesn't take long to conclude that the Tory agenda is inherently sexist.
By the end of the week Vanstone was in danger of choking on her own rhetoric. She asserted that we will have reached full equality when we have female politicians as mediocre as men. Memo Amanda: true equality may closer than you think
There were strong objections from CFMEU lawyers when Counsel Assisting, Nick Green, announced the decision as this week�s hearings wound up on Thursday afternoon.
CFMEU counsel Steve Crawshaw protested it was an "amazing" way to run any inquiry.
"I have been involved in many inquiries, including the Gyles Royal Commission, royal commissions, inquests, inquiries, and never have I had it suggested that those conducting the inquiry should only call one side of the story ...
"Here, it's been all one-sided. We have heard two weeks of evidence all one-way, and Counsel Assisting don't propose, as I understand it, to call any evidence to the contrary."
Commissioner Cole over-ruled the objection, saying there had never before been an inquiry such as his.
A Bit Facile
It was, Cole contended, "a bit facile to suggest now that there should be a new-found process of co-operation".
Cole's decision leaves the theoretical door open for CFMEU members to give further evidence but puts real practical obstacles in their paths. Essentially, each must submit a statement, dealing with hundreds of disparate claims made by a variety of witnesses.
Unlike in normal legal procedings, if the union seeks to cross examine at a later date, it must nominate the specific part of the testimony, the nature of its objection, and restrict itself to those matters.
So far, the commission has gathered 120 witness statements in NSW and has called just three CFMEU members.
CFMEU state secretary Andrew Ferguson was philosophical about the decision, once he had recovered from his initial shock.
"I suppose we have come to expect this treatment," Ferguson told Workers Online. "The evidence before the Commission has been unbalanced and this just makes it more so.
"You have to remember a Royal Commission is not a judicial process, it is a creation of the Federal Government who determine its terms of reference and fund Counsel Assisting."
Nevertheless, Cole's ruling retuns the spotlight to key issues about the way his Commission is being run.
Firstly, there is the issue of Counsels Assisting and their roles. There are a dozen or more of them, all high-paid lawyers sharing in a $19 million, taxpayer-funded, bonanza.
Theoretically, their role is to collect and present evidence so the Commission can come down with balanced findings.
With more than 130 fulltime workers at their disposal they spent months interviewing at least 200 people in NSW and preparing statements. Although the Commission has turned into a forensic examination of the CFMEU, its officials and practises, going back to 1996, they chose not to interview or prepare a statement from a single CFMEU person.
Instead, they will wheel up one anti-union statement after another. Some are demonstrably incorrect but all are read into the official record.
Strong Moral Obligation
In one example, Green painstakingly led CFMEU delegate Mario Barrios into what appeared to be a trap. He had Barrios testify that he and Ferguson tried to keep employers who ripped off the tax and workers comp systems out of their industry. Under further questioning, Barrios testified he paid his own taxes and had a strong moral objection to those who did not.
Then Green pounced, seizing on a typical uncontested statement from an employer who said she had once employed Barrios and paid him cash-in-hand.
Barrios was able to refute this categorically, and make it clear he had never worked for her company in his life.
Other employers, complaining of CFMEU harrassment, have had decisions entered against them in the Industrial Relations Commission, a factor apparently not considering relevant by those leading their evidence and certainly not revealed to the Commission.
Hearsay is repeatedly read into evidence and challenges to it have been over-ruled by the Commissioner. A variety of employers have testified to alleged union actions or demands, based on conversations they claim to have had with third parties well after the alleged events.
Employers have been asked to give evidence on the views of union members and had their replies accepted as evidence.
Increasingly, the rationale for the Commission is being questioned.
Theoretically, again, it was set up by Workplace Relations Minister Tony Abbott to inquire into "Innapropriate and Illegal Activity" across the industry. The name, CFMEU, does not get a mention in its terms of reference.
In practise, unions argue, it has become a one-trick pony concerned only with worker irregularities and misbehaviour.
One major Sydney radio station has laboured under a similar understanding, regularly labelling its reports as being from the "Royal Commission Into Union Corruption".
Ferguson has tried from the outset to have immigration scams; tax rorts said to cost the public purse up to a $1 billion annually; phoenixing; wage and entitlement rip-offs; and, most importantly, workplace safety brought under the spotlight.
The Commissioner responded by side-tracking most of those issues out of hearings reported by the media and into discusssion papers. Still, he says, they are on the agenda.
But, a sharp first-week exchange with Ferguson, left the question dangling, as the official transcript reveals:
MR FERGUSON: "I've seen workers on building sites subject to discrimination and intimidation and being sacked for raising safety issues. We have got issues here about safety, misuse of safety by union officials for ulterior motives. I'll acknowledge now union officials have made mistakes, but employers have made the same mistakes. Let's investigate both, not just abberant union behaviour. We know we all make mistakes in society, both sides, not just one side."
COMMISSIONER: Mr Ferguson, there is a great regime in every state and under the Commonwealth to investigate departures from occupational health and safety standards. They may not be being implemented as well as they might. That is one of the things that I have made clear this Commission is looking into.
"There is at present no organisation, with the exception of the Office of Employment Advocate, which, on the figures given to me today before yesterday (sic), mean that that one person is looking into the operations of about 780,000 people in the building industry, which examines in any way at all the manner which unions operate under the Workplace Relations Act.
"That is a major function of this inquiry. There are other major functions, which you have referred to, and I have indicated in the statements I have made the manner in which they will be addressed."
MR FERGUSON: "There's 100 statements collected by this Commission. Every single one attacks union behaviour; not one looks at the behaviour of employers. The terms of reference did not just relate to union behaviour, they relate to the whole industry, all the mistakes by all the parties.
"I'd like the opportunity to have 50 statements, less than the employers, about aberrant employer behaviour."
COMMISSIONER: "Yes, very well, what you have just said is not accurate, but I'm not going to trouble to spend the time debating it with you. We'll now proceed with the hearing."
Seven days later, with dozens of CFMEU officials under official notice that adverse evidence will be presented against them, they have been told they will not be called by the Commission to respond.
The NSW Industrial Relations Commission this week found it had jurisdiction to intervene in a dispute involving a labour hire worker and the host employer who had laid him off over a dispute with another worker out of working hours.
The ruling, by Commissioner Tabbaa, is a major step forward for labour hire workers, whose rights have been uncertain as they were thought to be legally employed by a third party.
The case was run by the Shop Assistants Union (SDA) on behalf of Fakatou Heitonga, who was placed on GlaxoSmithKline's Ermington plant by the labour hire firm, Forstaff.
After an incident involving another staff member after a company volleyball practice session, Heitonga was told he would not be offered any further hours.
The SDA took action in the IRC seeking a finding that an industrial dispute existed between the company and the union. For this to occur the union had to show that the host employer decisions had an industrial impact on the worker.
In making her finding, Commissioner Tabbaa noted that clarification of the status of labour hire workers and 'Host Employers' was necessary as it was a growing area of employment.
She rejected argument from the company that the commercial relationship between Forstaff and the company removed any legal obligations with Heitonga.
Instead, she found that due to the control exercised by the company over Heitonga, that an industrial dispute could exist and the matter could be arbitrated by the Commission.
She has given the parties 21days confer before moving on to a formal hearing of the matter.
The Wild West
NSW Labor Council secretary John Robertson says the decision represents a major breakthrough in the push to civilise the labour hire industry.
"At the moment the industry is something of the Wild West of industrial relations, with labour hire workers put in workplaces and told they have no legal rights," Robertson says.
He says the decision would also compliment the current push to regulate the labour hire industry and ensure employers did not use labour hire to undercut the award system.
With employers likely to appeal the decision, Robertson signaled that the Labor Council would intervene in any future proceedings.
Australian Services Union representatives went to the site following Hewlett-Packard�s announcement that it intended to slash up to 600 Aussie jobs as part of its merger with Compaq.
The ASU - who has coverage of technical support workers and those who service business equipment - will be campaigning around HP's redundancy issues alongside IT Union APESMA (ITPA). APESMA has coverage of high-level IT workers and managers.
In a letter to the Labor Council of NSW describing the incident, ASU secretary Luke Foley said that the IT industry in Australia is "dominated by US-owned multi-nationals and has traditionally adopted a hostile approach towards organised labour".
However, he said that as more companies are merging and jobs becoming increasingly difficult to find, "IT Workers have begun to seek the assistance of trade unions".
HP - who in 2000 were voted the best company in Australia to work for with over 1000 employees - has indicated in the media that it is willing to comply with the law on right of entry provisions.
The IT Workers Alliance will be assisting the ASU in its campaign to promote a fair redundancy package for HP and Compaq workers who are affected by the job-cuts.
For more information see the Australian IT report.
ACTU secretary Greg Combet wants to bring manufacturing unions and car companies together to thrash out an understanding of where the industry is headed.
"In the wake of the BHP confrontation, it's time for all parties to engage in a calm and reasoned dialogue to make sure the industry can resolve future disputes without the rancour seen at Westernport," Mr Combet says.
"The ACTU will do all it can to help create greater stability in Australia's steel and car industries, which are crucial to thousands of workers and the nation's economy."
Mr Combet said it had been a "gross misrepresentation" to blame BHP workers for damaging the country's export industry.
That was BHP's excuse for the early-morning raid by mounted police against 300 AMWU and ETU members at its Western Port factory. One striking worker and one police officer suffered minor injuries in scuffles outside the premises.
About 300 workers had been blocking factory gates for three weeks, blocking steel deliveries to car makers, to protest plans by Australia's largest steelmaker to fire maintenance staff and contract out their jobs.
Mr Combet said a co-operative discussion between industry stakeholders would be a positive step forward in the strained relationship between workers and employers.
The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union has joined forces with the Greens and the Wilderness Society to ban the use of tropical rainforest timbers on NSW building sites.
A growing trend for developers to request a style of concrete finishing which is achieved using rainforest wood as a mold has outraged unionists and environmentalists alike, inspiring them to forge an alliance to fight the wastage.
Currently the rainforest timber is being sourced from South East Asia at a price so low it is easy for developers to justify using it as 'throw-away' formply molding. Formply is used as a mold for concrete pouring operations such as footpaths, hoardings and bricks.
Because it is so cheap, South East Asian rainforest formply will dominate the market if nothing is done to require developers to use only sustainably produced formply from Australian forests. Thousands of Australian plantation jobs could be lost if the situation is not addressed now.
CFMEU state secretary Andrew Ferguson says the green ban was part of NSW building workers' continued commitment to protect the environment and congratulated the Greens and Wilderness Society for their stance on the issue.
Labor Council will convene a meeting of unions to co-ordinate local actions against Brylane, whose most visible local presence is represented by Gucci outlets.
"I will send out directions because, judging by the way most people here dress, they aren't going to know where Gucci stores are," secretary John Roberson said, hastily adding "and I include myself in that.
"Seriously, if we can put pressure on them they will come to the realisation that they have nowhere to hide."
Robertson outlined his seemingly-optimistic strategy after TCFUA secretary Barry Tubner had called on fellow unionists to support a freedom of association campaign being waged in the states.
Brylane, a manufacturer and retailer, is engaged in a showdown with American workers over their rights to join a union.
Tubner said the international campaign, beginning on Monday, had been organised to support American clothing workers union, UNITE.
"These American workers simply want the right to be represented by their union and to work under a union-negotiated contract," Tubner said. "No employer, anywhere in the world, should be able to get away with such a fundamental breach of human rights."
"I am concerned to ensure we have the best system to deal with criminal culpability in industrial manslaughter," Della Bosca says.
He has suggested working with Labor Council on terms of reference that will bring workable recommendations from the Workplace Compensation and Occupational Health and Safety Council.
The issue was sparked by union disquiet over the lack of WorkCover action on criminal sanctions available in the state's Occupational Health and Safety Act.
That statute provides for imprisonment and first offence fines of up to $550,000 for employers judged criminally liable for the deaths of employees but the provisions are rarely, if ever, used.
Last week CFMEU members offered prayers for killed workmates outside the Cole Royal Commission after it had stated its intention to brush workplace deaths out of widely-reported public hearings.
The mother and father of the 17-year-old killed on Broadway travelled from Tamworth to force a brief about-face from the commissioner.
Next week Maori and Polynesian workers will hold a church service for a young Maori killed on a building site just around the corner from where Cole is sitting. They are expected to march to the Family Court and issue another challenge to respect the issue, via a traditional haka.
Labor Council will refer Della Bosca's proposal to a meeting of affiliates considering the criminal liability of employers for OHS breaches.
Secretary John Robertson hailed the initiative as a step in the right direction.
"It's a way in which the issue can be addressed," Robertson says. "We have a concern but it is not about the capacity to have culpable employers charged, rather the willingness of WorkCover to take the appropriate action.
"This is a good first step towards dealing with the problem."
The Australian Workers Union, representing the jockeys in negotiations with insurers, says jockeys will cease riding at the end of the month if they are not be covered.
Jockeys are required to take out insurance from being sued by racehorse owners and other jockeys, before they can ride. All but the elite jockeys, negotiate a group insurance through brokers Jardines.
AWU NSW vice president Matt Thistlewaite says that, after warning jockeys their premiums would double, Jardines has now told them they can't find an insurer to cover them.
A crisis meeting will be held with NSW Gaming and Racing Minister Richard Face on Tuesday. If this does not resolve the issue, racing will come to a halt on July 1 when policy are due for renewal.
The historical significance of the case was highlighted when the commission requested a photo of the bar participants at the end of the hearings. The ACTU submitted over 1000 pages of submission plus a thousand pages of materials. Employers responded with similar quantities of evidence.
The ACTU'S advocate in the case, Assistant Secretary Richard Marles says the case has broadened the knowledge of everyone about the state of working time in Australia and the incredible financial and personal costs of the problem.
'A few years ago a parliamentary inquiry into fatigue in transport did costings in productivity time and accident time. One third of accidents were due to fatigue. Most were work related fatigue. The externality costs were estimated to be 3 billion dollars a year, ten times the total cost of the Reasonable Hours claim. Then there are the productivity and health costs from medical insurance claims, costs of sick leave and the costs of family breakdowns, he says.
'It is mind blowing the cost this country pays for the effects of long working hours. The pressure to act is now overwhelming.'
'We've estimated the full cost of the claim would be an increase of 0.7 per cent of labour costs in Australia. This compares with 0.5 per cent for the Living Wage. Even then it wouldn't be felt in one year and will drop with a change in employer behaviour.'
ACTU Secretary Greg Combet says the expert evidence provided to the commission during the case outlines the explosion in long hours in Australia and the personal costs.
This is backed up by new figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Westpac Bank which show that in the last 12 months, full-time employees averaged 42 hours a week, nearly two and a half hours more compared with the previous year,
"Australia has the second longest working hours in the OECD. A quarter of the workforce puts in more than 50 hours - that would be unlawful in Europe. It's little wonder Australia is experiencing the highest rate of childlessness since the Great Depression, " says ACTU Secretary Greg Combet.
He says an increasing number of workers were not being paid for their overtime and had no access to paid holiday and sick leave.
"The ABS figures say working at night or at the weekend is becoming the norm for 64 per cent of employees. Unfortunately stress, poor performance at work and pressure on family life have also become the norm for thousands of workers. The ACTU is asking the IRC to restore some balance to their lives."
"This test case is the first serious review of Australia's working hours in over half a century and is long overdue. If the ACTU succeeds, people working excessive overtime will be entitled to 2 days break and will establish flexible guidelines on unreasonable hours," Mr Combet said.
The workers, who control the giant SCG light towers, had been presented with the options of a seven-day roster or a pay cut to their overtime penalty rates.
Electrical Trades Union organizer Steve Butler said it was purely an exercise in cost reduction with little or no regard for employees.
"It will not reduce the price of a ticket to the football, it will not reduce the price of a beer or a pie, it will only allow Management to suck on lobster and champagne in a private box", Butler says.
By the end of the week, the SCG had agreed to withdrew the application to change working conditions, while the workers have undertaken to keep the lights for this week's Saturday night clash.
Talks will continue next week.
The National Electrical & Communications Association, Employers First, Australian Business and the Australian Industry Government State have taken the action during the Industrial Relations Commission's Review of Enterprise Agreements Principles.
They want the Commission to establish a new principle that would disallow agreements containing agents' or service fees will not be approved on the basis that it is not an industrial matter.
Currently service fee agreements can be registered when workers and employers agree to them. Employer groups have been frustrated that they have not been able to intervene and challenge them in the IRC.
Some 40 NSW enterprise agreements have bargaining fees clauses and the ETU is seeking to include them in the next round of construction agreements later this year.
NSW Labor Council secretary John Robertson says its ironic that employer organizations - who have longed advocated for greater workplace autonomy - are now trying to over-ride the wishes of workers and employers.
Early in the week airport security workers around Australia were cheering an AIRC decision, which improved the pay of Melbourne airport screeners who had been campaigning for more than two years.
The AIRC pay decision represents, in total, an 8% increase for a group of workers who until now were among the lowest-paid workers at the airport.
Most airport screeners currently get paid around $12 an hour.
Jeff Lawrence, LHMU National Secretary, immediately called a national airport security delegates video-conference to discuss the Victorian decision and warned: " we will expect all security employers, at all airports, to quickly fall into line and improve the pay packets of our members."
Postcard Campaign
The union's airport security members around the nation are currently handing out postcards to passengers, reminding them that in the nine months since the September 11 tragedy - the Federal Government has done little or nothing to improve airport screening.
The campaign has upset and irritated the Federal Government with senior ministers coming out and attacking the LHMU repeatedly for handing out the postcards asking people to mail them to the Deputy PM and Minister for Transport, John Anderson.
At Thursday's airport delegates' videoconference Brisbane members reported that more than 100 airport screeners and security workers, employed by Group 4, had won a 29% pay increase over the three-year life of a new enterprise agreement.
The Brisbane agreement had been held up because of the argy-bargy going on in the Victorian work value case - but union delegates moved quickly after the AIRC decision to tie up all loose ends to get a deal for Queensland members.
" The LHMU Airport Security Union members in Brisbane won the agreement - to follow up on their Victorian sisters and brothers earlier in the week - because of the strong discipline and co-operation we have developed in our national airport security campaign," Jeff Lawrence said.
" The Brisbane airport workers, like those in Victoria, have developed a strong delegate structure which has been prepared to voice the anger of members - and they have been able to quickly capitalise on the Melbourne victory.
Brisbane Gets More Holidays
" Once Victorian members employed by Chubb won their important work value case we were able to sign off with Group 4 an agreement which takes into account the Victorian win, as well as providing a shorter 38 hour working week, and an extra week's holiday leave.
" We have also opened up a new round of bargaining with Group 4, who employ airport security workers in Darwin and Canberra, and expect fairly quickly to win similar increases for LHMU union members at these airports.
" The LHMU is quickly developing a check list of airports where we are seeking to win new agreements with security employers.
" Our members around Australia want to see similar wins to the important breakthrough won first by a well organised group of union members at Melbourne airport - and now won at Brisbane airport.
" The national airport security campaign shows that when union members get together, and support each other, they will eventually win a just increase - but we cannot deliver a win without members standing up and making sure that their voices are heard."
The union says Starbucks management is going out of its way to block the union's efforts to negotiate a new collective agreement at its unionised outlets, saying no to every proposal they put on the table.
Meanwhile, if the company gets its way it will scrap the organisation's existing seniority system - a move that would have serious implications for job security and the fair scheduling of hours.
Calling their current campaign an "UnStrike", union members are continuing to work at Starbucks while defying the company dress code in a bid to draw customers' attention their struggle. They are also distributing leaflets to Starbucks patrons, labour, community, progressive organisations and individuals by hand and via the internet.
For more information about the Starbucks campaign visit the Canadian Auto Workers' website.
The beefed up campaign will target the use of child labour in five major industries where the use of child labour is most prevalent, including agriculture, industry, domestic labour, sexual exploitation and trafficking.
Recent ILO figures show the trade union movement is already leading the battle to demand education and a future instead of the life of exploitation and danger millions of child workers currently endure.
But ICFTU head of campaigns says the problem "remains far from solved".
"It is no coincidence that when adults' trade union rights are repressed, child labour is prevalent," he says. "And denying children the right to education effectively deprives them of their future."
The union announced the new leg of its campaign on June 12, the inaugural World Day Against Child Labour.
Sydney World Refugee Week Rally
Peaceful rally at Circular Quay and March to Hyde Park
11am Sunday 23rd June
Speakers include Tom Keneally, Neville Roach, Patrick Lee (IEU), Sheikh el Hilali (Mufti of Australia), Margaret Reynolds (National President, UN Association) and Nooria Wazifadost (Afghan refugee)
For more information call 0417 275 713 or 0408 057 779 or 0428 190 276
Labor for Refugees - Western Sydney Meeting
At the next meeting Zachary Steel, a clinical psychologist, will speak on "The effects of mandatory detention"
The meeting is on Monday 17 June at 7.00 pm at the CFMEU, 12 Railway Street, Lidcombe
For more information call Karen Iles on 0412 462 646 or 9749 0400 (work) or email [email protected]
Labour Hire Companies: The Industrial Wild West
Politics in the Pub presents Dave Oliver, Assistant National Secretary of the AMWU and John Buchanan, Assistant Director of ACIRRT to discuss Labour Hire Companies.
Where: Gaelic Club, 64 Devonshire Street, Surry Hills
When: 21 June 2002 at 6.00pm
For more information see http://www.politicsinthepub.org
NSW Parliament Amnesty International Group Celebtration for Aung San Suu Kyi's Birthday
Eminent citizen of East Timor and wife of President Xanana Gusmao will be the special guest at an intimate gathering of female friends of Burma's wonderful Aung San Suu Kyi (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Companion of the Order of Australia and General secretary of the National League for Democracy), to celebrate this remarkable woman on the occasion of her birthday.
This is a small but significant way we can honour this remarkably courageous woman who provides inspiration to all of Burma's people and to the international community.
Venue: NSW Parliament Dining Room
Date: Wednesday 19th June
Time: 12:00PM for 12:30PM
Cost: $40.00
Please pay at the lunch or by cheque payable to NSW House Committee. Telephone The Hon. Janelle Saffin MLC for further information, or to accept on 9230 3306.
If you have any events you want advertised in the Activists Notebook please email them to mailto:[email protected]
Luke Foley's argument for allowing affiliated union members to vote in preselections has much to recommend it. This used to be the case in the ALP. But if we are to adopt such a system we need to review how it worked previously. Accusations that it was manipulated by union officials were rife, particulary in the case of the AWU.
Only a limited number of union members took the opportunity to participate in preselections. Only 63,000 party members and unionists voted in the 1931 NSW Lang Labor Senate preselection for example, when membership in ALP-affiliated unions was claimed to be around 217,000.
Nevertheless this is still a much higher level of participation in the ALP than today, and puts complaints about the dictatorial Lang machine into some context. Labor preselection candidates would campaign on street corners for unionists' votes. My PhD on Jack Lang's 1930-32 government has more details on ALP preselections in the early 1930s.
Geoff Robinson
Last week, I sent in a letter which you titled "our home is girt by wire". In the letter I wrote, not attributed to me, I suggested that the current policy consensus on refugees was unacceptable with regards to the values that ought to sustain our way of life.
What I forgot to point out was that if one was to take the position that refugees should not be allowed to come to Australia from "transit countries" (so that we can break the people smugglers' trade), the natural alternative is that you must ensure that the UNHCR is properly funded in the countries of "first asylum". Leaving aside that there is not one signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees (or the Protocol) between Afghanistan and Australia, at least you'd think the "hard" border protectionists would want to ensure that the "queue" was properly functional.
This, unfortunately, is simply not the case, leaving the question open as to whether the Howard Government wants to accept refugees at all, even if they do "wait in line".
So the fabric of the policy orthodoxy is unravelling. This is unfortunate. I have recently been party to some advice on our internal polling from certain MPs. It has apparently been found that the Liberals are capable of stringing another four election victories together solely on the issue of refugees. This has become the new "Vietnam" for us.
Despite the resolve of the state branches, it is unlikely that a policy will be presented to the electorate that is radically different to the Howard position. The FPLP will not adopt the Labor for Refugees charter. Equally, it is not foreseeable that a split will occur in the party over the issue. And whether we like to admit it or not, we simply would not have a substantial number of members in Parliament if we had done anything but follow the Howard Government on the issue - sad, but true. I voted for Kim Beazley, but I did so (as did many other party members) knowing that our position on asylum seekers was shambolic.
The best thing Simon Crean could do on this issue is to address the concerns of the UNHCR. At the very least it should be recognised that if you accept the current criteria of the debate, you have to fill the holes. Whilst I agree with a substantial part of the Labor for Refugees platform, whether we like it or not we are stuck with the concept of "overseas processing". At least we should propose funding this process accordingly.
Secondly, there has not been enough rational debate regarding our allotted intake. John Howard said that the current figure of 12,000 per year was "correct", a strange Orwellian slip during the election campaign. The Democrats have made noises about increasing the rate by 4 or 5,000. Surely we might like to consider doubling our intake?
Overall, if we accept the terms of debate (as is likely) and maintain the status quo of cracking down on refugees who move through "transit countries" and thus maintaining a "queue", the least the FPLP could do to regain our damaged pride is to advocate ways of co-operating properly with the UNHCR, ensuring it can run it's operations in an orderly manner. Further, it is also worth considering increasing our intake from the low figure of 12,000 per year, to something far more substantial. If the electorate wishes to maintain a regime of "border protection" (as is the cold reality), the least we can do is work around this to find more humane solutions to the status quo.
It is disappointing that the Liberals have chosen, for the sake of electoral advantage, to completely throw rational and sensible policy-making out the window, fanning the flames of hysteria. I will stop short of using the word "racist" (as many people have been doing) simply because labelling the coalition "racist" is exactly what they want us to do (remember the 1996 "for all of us" campaign?). It will take time before Labor is able to re-inject some common sense into the debate, but I cannot see anything occur beyond a gradual process of working around the terms of debate, advocating some sensible changes, with the long term view of shifting public opinion. It is only then that we can start addressing some of the more adventurous, but favourable, ideas regarding the reform of Mandatory Detention.
Let's try to unravel public faith in the orthodoxy, and with time, we may be able to win people over with a sensible platform for government.
Steve Murray Edwards
Ed's Reply: Apologies for not attributing this week. The letters is an arduous chaore completed minutes before deadline by a flagging ed ....
message: Once again, Tom Collins' weekly column, embedded in the Letters to the Editor section (Workers Online #139), rambles about its way, taking cheap shots at opponents as it goes. On the topic of refugees, when the column is stripped of his flowery language, Tom seems to have only two things to say - that a majority of people agree with John Howard & the right-wing shock jocks and that refugees are "wealthy foreign predators" diverting resources from more deserving causes.
Firstly, Tom seems to think that just because a majority of people think something that makes them right. Well, it's a good thing that Tom Collins' co-thinkers didn't prevail 500 years ago, for if they had, we'd still be being taught that the Earth is the centre of the universe and the sun revolves around it. Fortunately for us, however, some people took up Galileo's telescope & proved that, contrary to popular opinion, he was the one who was right.
Secondly, refugees are, in almost all cases, destitute by the time they get to Australia if not before. While the people smugglers are, for the most part, the scum of the Earth, their clients are desperate people willing to sell everything they have and often using the savings of their extended family as well. Tom asks the question "The money or the box?" I'm sure in the same place, though, Tom would scrape the money together if his alternative was being six feet under in a box.
Tom's most outrageous argument, however, is that refugees should have nothing because of the other deserving causes which are doing without. Hasn't he been paying attention to the growing inequality of wealth & income in Australia? Hasn't he noticed the cuts to company tax, the capital gains tax rort, the big business handouts & the alarming military build-up? How about taking from the RICH for a change, Tom?
Workers must defend refugees because to do otherwise is to let the employing class divide us on racial lines. In the course of this, we need "friends" like Malcolm Fraser like a hole in the head (I haven't forgotten 11 November 1975, even if others have), but Tom Collins seems to forget that the foundation principle of unionism, an injury to one is an injury to all, applies to refugees as well.
In Solidarity,
Greg Platt
Hey, Just in response to the Mark Latham debate, Marks' ideas are not particulary original. They are for the most part based on co-operative models except in Marks' case the beneficiary is compelled to participate.
The essential compulsion arises due to failure of the economic system to produce enough jobs for everyone. Those compelled are usually unemployable and its there kids some of his programs are targeting.
What he dosen't understand or perhaps he understands too well is that the best thing You can do for the poor is too raise their incomes. To raise their incomes they have to have job. Labor and the Liberals are not at all prepared to generate the jobs needed so the third way is being thrown about as an essential distraction.
Well although they wont back a full employment policy they will hand out a few shares and a savings account for the children of the underclass to spend on whatever western consumerist thing of the future must have.
Paolo Fitori
Dear Sir,
The recent antics by our comrades in Federal Parliament and the arrogance in the NSW State Parliament cannot be allowed to pass without further comment.
The perverse paraphrasing and translation of the message given to the ALP, through the "Wran Committee", not only by the actual presentations from those that attended this gatherings of the clans, but from careful examination of the demographics of members who chose not to attend, and while I have in the past had great admiration for Neville Wran, the conclusion of this investigation, reminds me of a quote attributed to that analytical philosopher Bertrand Russell:
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
In the case of the Wran report, it is providing that which was already decreed.
As for our comrades in Federal Parliament , with adoption of policies which are in direct conflict with the majority of the population and the ease of passage with which they are being lead into a double dissolution , indicates a divided house on the precipice of irrelevance.
Even "Blind Freddie", could not fail to see the path of destruction being prepared for this gaggle of ALP malcontents who like Judas Sheep, will lead those parliamentarians who are of weak will to their political slaughter.
While the shenanigans in Parliament may like all purchased pleasures give immediate satisfaction, it is a temporary state of euphoria.
This euphoria would not be unlike a bullfight, where the picadors continually torment the victim, prior to the "coup de gr�ce". It is not the actual kill which is the muse of the spectators but the torment of the victim, and it would appear that the peonies of Howard, being Abbott and Costello, have taken over the role of the picador by continually sticking the vara in the most sensitive parts of the ALP Bulls both young and old. The success of this tactic being manifested by the response being not one of attacking the Bullfighter , peonies or picadors , but the horse , which in this case is the Parliament.
Even the most ignorant of the electorate is aware that an attack on parliament is a personal attack on every Australian, even Charles 1, with the assistance of a parliamentarian was painfully and permanently educated as to the power of Parliament.
But enough of the philosophical and historical waffle, if the ALP and the Union movement does not get its act together, and presents an acceptable face to the people of Australia, people who are weary of the treacherous resource wasting antics of some unions under the guise of duplicitous solidarity, while their selfish members and representatives appear on television programs professing only a pecuniary interest in their own circumstance, and every one else can go and get stuffed.
Do these people or the Unions that represent them honestly believe that ordinary Australians, after being treated in such a contemptuous manner would still support disruptive activities?
I think not! Even the most committed Don Quixote such asN, must eventually come to terms with the decadent futility of feeding strawberries to pigs.
Personally in dealing with aresholes and gobshites at all levels of their self aggrandisement in society or politics; I find the philosophy of G.K.Chesterton appropriate as descriptive in the appropriation of God given recourses:
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
And Nietzsche helps in handling the personal attacks:
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter.
Tom Collins
by Peter Lewis
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It's the centenary of female suffrage this week. How much is there to celebrate for women?
I think there's a lot to celebrate, but that's not to underestimate the long way that we still have to go to achieve genuine equality for women, in every sphere of life and in the political arena as well. Its ironic that we celebrate the fact that Australia led the world in allowing women the right to vote and stand in elections, but it actually took us 41 years after the act was passed in 1902 before we had the first Labor representative in the Federal Parliament, Dorothy Tangney in the Senate and in NSW we had to wait until 1983 before we had our first women in the Lower House Jeanette McHugh. So you can see that the struggle has been a long and winding road, as they say, but we are certainly making good progress, but still with a lot to do in the future.
What's your take on the current debate in the ALP around quotas? Some worry that by putting a numerical weighting it just makes gender another factor in the factional power game. Do you think quotas have delivered good results?
I think so, I mean if you look back at 1995, the representation of women in the lower house, was only 9�%, an absolute appalling state of play, when you consider that women make up over half the Australian population. So without the affirmative action strategy that was adopted by the national conference of the ALP, we wouldn't be in the position that we are today, where Labor women now hold 20 seats in the House of Representatives (30%). It wouldn't, in my judgement, have happened without the affirmative action commitment.
It was the same in the union movement, when we had to move, had to redress the injustice of the under representation of women and the only way you can do it within the kind of patriarchal institutional framework in which women have operated, was to do it via a rule changes. Leaving it just to the effluxion of time would have meant that we would have been on this quest for ever. So it hastened the goal which was to ensure that our party and the union movement was much more representative and reflective of its base.
The Conservative parties have also managed big increases, without quotas. Is there anything that Labor can learn from those parties about the way they've gone about changing their profile of members?
Well it's interesting that in the last few years, the representation of Liberal women has improved. But that said, the women in the Liberal Party, are clustered in the more marginal seats. If there is a swing our way, numbers of them might end up losing their seats. Also their representation is not as good as ours in the Lower House. The seven NSW women are all from traditionally safe Labor seats; that's an important breakthrough.
How far do you think the ALP is off from having a women's factional warlord?
Oh, a long long way off. I noticed Susan Ryan's comments this week in the media and I think we've got be careful that we don't see the positive increase in representation of women in isolation from the outcome. I mean, it's well and good to be able to pride ourself on the fact that our representation has achieved the targets that we set, but you've then got to ask the question , "ok, we've got these additional women there, but to what extent are they exercising power and influence?". While the most senior woman from NSW Janice Crosio, has the position of Whip, we don't have any NSW female representation in shadow ministry or shadow cabinet. There is a handful of women in the shadow ministry, but certainly not in the proportion that one would want to achieve through an affirmative action strategy.
In terms of the factions, they are well and truly dominated and organised by men. I don't know necessarily that that's where women want to be. I think the Party is starting to realise that the factional system in the last decade has imposed some rigidity. I think women are going to enhance the fluidity within the party structures, rather than aspiring to be factional chieftains.
Beyond the EMILY's List fundraising, are there networks developing of women across the factions related to specific issues?
Yes we've got a very active Status of Women caucus committee, which has made a submission to the Hawke-Wran Enquiry, pointing out some of the failings that they perceived in the last federal election. It suggests that women in the party are a great resource, that have been under utilised more particularly so in the last federal election campaign. Now that committee is operating on a cross factional basis, and I think in the next couple of months we will be setting out a long term agenda and framework for the operations of that committee. I'm delighted that already, through the influence of women in leadership positions like Jenny Macklin and Carmen Lawrence, the introduction of paid maternity leave is now a high priority for federal Labor. So it's really important that in being there, we don't lose sight of why we're there and that we keep the feminist fires burning away and influencing policy in a direction which suits the aspirations of women.
Of course, one of the concerns around the whole issue on how far we've gone towards the feminist agenda is that it's still regarded as woman's business. Are there men down in Canberra that you see are picking up the ball as well?
I think what we're seeing is what we see saw in the union movement, that over a period of time, the mainstream political agenda incorporates the perspectives of women into it. I'll give you just one example, in our counter response to Peter Costello's superannuation proposal, it was in fact Nick Sherry who argued very cogently about the impact of the changes on the rights of casual workers to access superannuation benefits. Here was a good example of a major political response by the ALP, focusing on the impacts that it would have on casual workers who are predominantly and overwhelmingly women. I'm starting to sense that we're not just the add on at the end of the caucus agenda, but we're in there. I've been really heartened by the fact that caucus is operating in a very democratic manner and that women are getting up and having a say about the issues that are important to them, and to the ALP's future.
Personally, you've been in federal parliament more than 6 months now. Is it what you expected?
I'm finding it incredibly challenging. What I'm finding fascinating is the mix of real grassroots stuff, helping local constituents with problems they have with Centrelink or the Child Support Agency, or through immigration matters and then playing a role when you go down to Canberra, in terms of framing our policies and responses on issues of national significance. It provides the best of both worlds, and I've come at a really good time, when all the policies are open for review, and I'm really on quite a steep learning curve.
The last couple of weeks we've seen particularly macho images coming from federal parliament. Is there a different way that we could run parliament that would take away a bit of that testosterone??
I think the images of Question Time are a bit of a put off for women. I know men and women comment to me about what they perceive to be childish behaviour on the part of politicians. You've got to understand that once you are there in Question Time, the provocation comes from the government benches, particularly by one Tony Abbott, and so the adrenalin does start pumping. You're not just sitting there in a totally sterile atmosphere; you're engaging in the thrust of political debate and the contest of ideas. It's hard to refrain sometimes, I mean I've interjected a couple times, I try not to.
I think question time is really the opportunity for the opposition to put the government under pressure and what we're finding is, it's questions without answers really. What we get is long diatribes about the 60/40 rule and about what Simon might have said 20 years ago. It's perverting the intent of Question Time and we're not going to allow the Liberals off the hook when they make far fetched accusations about people sitting on our side of the chamber. To that extent I think Mark Latham has been given the job of being a most effective counterpoint to the nonsense that we hear from the likes of Tony Abbott.
The debate is currently being raised over union involvement in the ALP. As someone who's been in both institutions, what's your perspective?
I think the 60/40 focus is the wrong focus. If we woke up tomorrow and the rule was 50/50, do we really think the world would have changed? You've got to look at the fact that, in NSW the Carr Government has done extremely well, in a state where 60/40 is the rule. So any suggestion that the links to the union movement are detrimental to the party is, absolutely wrong. I understand the need for Simon to modernise the party, just like Greg and Sharan and John have the responsibility of modernising the union movement and making sure that it meets the challenges of the new millennium.
But modernisation doesn't mean forsaking your history and your traditions and I think that's the danger in arguing for the watering down of the links with the union movement. We have been there historically to be the political voice and arm of the industrial movement. We are here primarily to represent working people and their families and issues of concern to them. We are fundamentally a party that represents the union base, I have never heard an argument to justify diminishing our links with the unions movement. I've not heard one compelling argument for this, up until now.
Does it concern you though that there does seem to be this imperitive that Labor needs to distance itself from its union base to be electable?
John Howard and Tony Abbot have tried to make this an issue. We have responded to a perception rather than an issue of substance. My personal view is the links with the union movement are not an negative for Labor, because if they were, please explain why every state is run by Labor governments. Whether it be a 50/50 or a 60/40 rule, we're the elected government in every state and I think the reasons for the loss in the last federal action are far more profound than any link with the union movement. In fact the reverse could be true, a lot of my constituents say, they would like the ALP to be more gung ho about representing the aspirations of working people. That's just my view, and I guess we'll await the outcome of the Hawke-Wran Enquiry.
Has distance changed your perspective on the union movement?
Obviously I'm still very interested in the developments in the union movement. One of the things I think is fantastic is the number of young people who've made a commitment to work within the ranks of the union movement. That augurs really well for the future. I'm proud of the union movement in taking up the debate on the refugees/ asylum seeker issue. The NSW decision was a cross functional outcome led by the union movement and John Robertson in particular.
I think it's time that the Labor Party followed suit. I mean factions play a role, but when they become a straight jacket on the free flow of ideas and policy issues, I think that's a more profound issue for the review committee, than the 60/40 rule.
Finally, Helen Clark is going to the polls in New Zealand and she's the red hot favourite. Is there anything that Labor can learn from her success?
Well, I think what has been amazing about the New Zealand experience is that the government is led by a woman who is electorally very popular. What can we learn from that? I think we can learn what we should already know, that having women in political roles is not an electoral liability, in fact, all the studies show a higher degree of acceptance and encouragement for women who take on those responsibilities, both in the industrial and political wings of the movement.
by Jim Marr
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NSW labour - left, right and centre - came together on a windy Sydney afternoon. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they slapped a collective arm around the CFMEU and raised a figurative finger to the machinations of Commissioner Cole, seven floors above.
Cole's attempt to pass his commission off as impartial, last week, didn't wash. Banners alone told that story, pronouncing the disbelief of organisations across the labour spectrum. The TWU, CPSU, TCFUA, ASU, LHMU, MUA, FSU, ETU, AMWU, RTBU, PSA, Plumbers, Teachers, Nurses and Musicians were just some who flagged their defiance.
The message, however, was spelled out in more than banners. Serbian iconographer, Rados Stevanovic, drew his tribute to the CFMEU while the Urban Guerillas hammered out their story from the back of a truck.
"It's alright for you, you have got everything you need.
"It's alright for you to treat me like a disease."
Their lyrics could have been purpose-written for a Commissioner, pulling in $660,000 a year, plus perks, while sitting in judgement on building workers organising for an extra $30-$40 a week.
The Guerillas rendition of, Touch One, Touch All, provided an appropriate theme for the afternoon.
LHMU secretary Annie Owens told the crowd that the secret to the CFMEU's status amongst NSW workers was that it was "generous with its power".
"You won't see any Royal Commission into hotel workers because the Government doesn't think we have power," she said.
Owens told of two successful disputes last year when predominantly immigrant hotel workers had their spirits and fortunes lifted by the active support of CFMEU members.
"Their presence changed two important circumstances," Owens explained. "Our members realised they weren't alone and the bosses knew it too.
"If Royal Commission members are staying in a Sydney hotel tonight they would do well to look under their beds because the CFMEU has friends everywhere."
The TCFUA's Barry Tubner said the CFMEU was like a big brother to smaller unions. Every time his clothing workers had had trouble, he reported, moral and financial support had been forthcoming.
MUA rep Sean Chaffer talked about practical support on 1998 picketlines when his organisation was battling for its survival.
The breadth of support must have gladdened Labor Council secretary, John Robertson, who has pronounced factionalism the enemy of trade unionism.
Robertson told unions that the $60 million commission was a threat to the existence of each and every one of them.
"In the past, we knew the Government was there, pulling the strings," Robertson said. "The difference this time is they have come out of the closet and announced it.
"This isn't just about the building unions or even de-unionising the workforce. It is about this Government driving down wages and conditions and that will impact on every Australian.
"If they can give the CFMEU the flick, they will start working their way down the list but we will stand together. We will repel this attack and we will win."
CFMEU secretary Andrew Ferguson outlined the modus operandi of the Cole Commission.
They were, he said, pillorying the union and its activists with statements from bodgey employers, being read into the record without being subject to cross examination.
"By and large, the statements they are relying on are from tax cheats and employers who rort the system," Ferguson said. "This morning we heard from a contractor who uses cheap labour from Cambodia, doesn't meet his tax obligations and cuts corners on safety.
"He said our delegate was too tough on his company. That's the cheek of this Commission."
Ferguson left listeners cheering their approval when he said CFMEU members didn't fear the outcome of a commission, widely tipped to be heading down the track of deregistration or an industry task force.
"We have absolute confidence in the outcome here," Ferguson said. "We are confident what their outcome will be but we know what our outcome is - the membership of our union will not be intimidated."
Cole's sop to the CFMEU - allowing two people an hour on workplace safety after categorically stating he wouldn't hear such evidence - was never going to balance day after day, week after week, of uncontested "evidence" smearing the union. It's hard to believe he thought it would.
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What's a nurse worth? The answer is central to the future of Australian health care and, this week, the question moved from hospital wards and city streets to the rather more rarified atmosphere of the Industrial Relations Commission.
Nurses appear to have chalked up victories in the first two theatres. Thousands joined protest rallies and struck in support of their union's claim for a one-off 15 percent wage rise and a special retention allowance.
Their actions won endorsement from rank and file citizens. More than 110,000 people, up and down the state, signed a petition to go before state parliament, urging wage justice.
But still Bob Carr's state government says 'no' and that's why, this week, the wigs and gowns went on and the campaign moved indoors, to a fourth-floor courtroom above the harbour end of Phillip St.
For reasons of legal necessity the case isn't being fought on the obvious grounds of recruitment and retention. Rather, nurses are going down a track that will require them to prove to the Commission's full bench that modern nursing skills aren't recognised by current remuneration.
Essentially, they are saying, their work has become more intense, skillful and complex than traditional arrangements perceive.
But it's not just nurses making the point.
On its third sitting day the commission was told progressive reductions in resource allocations had left the public hospital system reeling.
Professor John Dwyer, clinical project director at the Prince of Wales Hospital, warned that a nursing shortage would see "significant numbers of elderly and disadvantaged people" denied urgently-needed care this winter.
He told the commission that, on average, 143 available beds went unused every day at Prince of Wales.
"The reason we cannot utilise our bed capacity at the Prince of Wales Hospital is readily identified; it has proved impossible to recruit even the minimum number of nurses nceessary for us to safely service additional beds. At present, my hospital has no fewer than 130 vacancies for permanent nursing staff positions," Professor Dwyer said.
So what? Well, according to the professor, the ramifications are felt all along the line.
- To utilise 507 of the 650 available beds at Prince of Wales requires substantial use of casual or agency nurses, 91 on an average day.
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- This casualisation "compromises" the quality of clinical activities and blows out an already-strained budget.
- Fulltime nurses come under "unreasonable" pressures to keep the hospital operating.
- Leave, including that required for professional study, becomes a burden on workmates
Professor Dwyer says in the clincial disciplines under his direction it costs more than half as much again to employ an agency nurse as a fulltime employee. This practise, he says, is the single biggest reason for unbudgeted expenditure in his areas of expertise.
Then Professor Dwyer addressed himself to the changing nature of nurses work.
He argues that changing regimes mean there are no longer any "easy" patients, that those admitted are consistently more demanding in terms of their physical, medical and psychological needs, than in the past.
An ageing population means increasing medical complications and multiple treatments, procedures therapies and drug regimes.
Professor Dwyer's experiences mirrored, in general terms, those reported by Kath Needham, senior nurse manager at Westmead Hospital's Intensive Care Unit.
Needham said Intensive Care patients were older and sicker than five years ago. This, she said, was born out by application of the internationally-accepted APACHE system, which measures acuity and dependency.
"There is greater resort to more and more complex technology. The therapies are more complex and require greater monitoring. The consequential demands for nursing staff are substantial, particularly in the areas of education and training," Needham told the commission.
"The expectations imposed on ursing staff suggests they must be able to perform at a very high level over longer periods. Double shifts are commonplace," he says.
Other cuts, he argues, see overworked nurses, increasingly responsible for physiotherapy, speech pathology, occupational therapy and social work.
On top, human resource and clerical duties are, more and more, being shifted onto registered nurses.
Interestingly, the expertise of both witnesses has been recognised by state government.
Dwyer co-chairs the Greater Metropolitan Transitional Taskforce set up to implement 169 recommendations for improving the quality of hospital services throughout NSW. Needham, who also serves on that body, was appointed by Health Minister Craig Knowles to co-chair the group that brought down the state's Intensive Care Services Plan - Adult Services..
Unless, we missed something, both seemed to be telling the commission that unless urgent action is taken to recognise and reward nurses, the best efforts of such bodies will be continually undermined.
The case is continuing.
by ILO
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Alice - At 14, Alice lost her parents. Unwanted by relatives, she accepted the offer of a family "acquaintance" to come to Nigeria's capital Lagos, two days' journey from her home town. Instead of taking her to vocational classes as promised, the woman took Alice to a brothel. There, she was forced to stay and pay off the debt of her travel expenses. "I was afraid all the time," she confides.
Today, Alice is in Geneva, no longer trapped in the unconditional worst forms of child labour. Instead, she's recalling her experiences as part of events being organized for the first World Day Against Child Labour. She's part of the effort to intensify support for the global campaign against child labour which will be held annually, during the International Labour Organization's annual conference, where member states will discuss the report.
According to the ILO's Global Report on Child Labour released last month, there are 246 million child workers between the ages of 5 and 17. That's one out of every six children in the world.
"We are asking everyone to join together in working towards a world where no children will be deprived of a normal, healthy childhood, where parents can find decent jobs and children can go to school," says Juan Somavia, Director-General of the ILO.
Sergei, 13, remembers a normal childhood. He attended school till the age of 11, when his father abandoned the family and his baby sister Nina was born. Then everything changed. "My mother said to me, 'We have no money for food,' " says Sergei. "I was afraid my baby sister would die." Ten hours a day, Sergei begged outside a metro station in St. Petersburg.
While the public perception of child labour confines it to developing economies, 2.5 million of the world's child labourers are in industrialized countries, and another 2.4 million, like Sergei, live in transition economies.
The vast majority of child workers (127 million) live in Asia, followed by sub-Saharan Africa (48 million), Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East and North Africa. Surveys in developing countries indicate that the vast majority (70 per cent) of children who work are in agriculture, fishing, hunting or forestry. Others are in domestic work, transportation, construction, and retail.
Political and economic instability and criminal exploitation play a part in child labour. If parents cannot find work, or if the system provides little social protection and educational opportunity, children end up as breadwinners. Sergei's mother had to stop working when his baby sister was born handicapped. Alice survived a criminal enterprise.
The demand for consumer goods has fed the child labour market. Many large corporations prefer a young and therefore cheap workforce. Family-owned, small-scale enterprises cannot afford adult paid labour. Weak law enforcement makes matters easier all around. Alice often suffered violence at the hands of police who came to raid the brothel.
One of the goals of the ILO's International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) is to stamp out the worst forms of child labour. 8.4 million children are forced to work as prostitutes, bonded slaves, or armed combatants.
Action must come at various levels. The ILO says that governments must be encouraged to ratify the conventions on child labour. And as Alice and Sergei's stories show, children need a world at peace and a measure of economic and social security. This requires partnerships between governments, employers' and employees' associations, and non-governmental organizations.
Alice's way out came in the form of such a partnership, through a chance conversation at her hairdresser's'. "A woman there told me about Womens' Consortium of Nigeria (WOCON)," which is supported by IPEC. Through WOCON, Alice receives counseling and training as a hairdresser. She is working towards establishing her own salon.
Sergei met a social worker on the street one day who bought him some bread and made a phone call. "That phone call was like a light in the window," says Sergei matter-of-factly. It was a call to an IPEC-supported programme for street children. Through the programme, Sergei's mother was able to apply for a state allowance. Now Sergei attends school, and is planning to be a railway engineer, "so I can ride the trains all the time."
The duo has a message for the Geneva gathering: "I want you to prevent children having to work. There are many kids on the street, and there shouldn't be any," says Sergei.
"I want people to know what happens to children like me, and I want it to stop," Alice says softly. "I want to be proud of what I do. I want to be proud of myself."
Asif's story
Asif helps make some of the world's surgical instruments. At the age of 12, he is at the end of a supply chain worth 30 billion dollars a year, producing instruments for hospitals, doctor's rooms and beauty parlours across the globe.
His workshop may sell a surgical scissor for about $27 which then can be sold through a string of middlemen on the international market for up to $143. But little of that profit trickles back to Sialkot, where Asif has been working since the age of seven.
To help repay debt incurred by his father, Asif works on 600 pieces a day, filing and grinding. He is exposed to hazards most adults wouldn't tolerate. The fine metal dust damages eyes and causes breathing problems. Various machines cause cuts and burns.
But the larger danger is intangible.
In 1999 the surgical manufacturers industry in Sialkot decided to remove all children from this dangerous work. But immediate withdrawal would mean a disastrous loss of income for families already mired in poverty - and a risk that parents would put their children into even more hazardous work.
So the International Labour Organisation opted for a gradual approach: they helped establish non-formal education centres. For two hours every afternoon, children like Asif go to this special school, taking classes and interacting with children their own age. Like this they still earn money every day, while catching up on their education.
The ILO hopes to reach this target by ensuring that no new children are recruited into the industry and that working children continue with their schooling until adulthood. The biggest challenge however will still come from families struggling to survive - until perhaps more educated sons like Asif help turn their situation around.
by Neale Towart
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In some US states, such as Utah and Wyoming, the right already existed. According to Patricia Grimshaw, in "Suffrage and Beyond" edited by Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan (Auckland Uni. Press and Pluto Press, 1994), the passage of women's suffrage in Utah was not something that feminists could boast about. Utah was and is a Mormon Territory. Some saw the chance of women's suffrage as a way to get rid of polygamy. So, in apparent retaliation for campaigns on these issues, Mormon men voted for suffrage for women in 1870 to show the world that Mormon women were happy with polygamy! In Washington, male legislators removed the women's vote in 1887, this time to reduce the Mormon vote in Utah Territory, in the hope that non-Mormon citizens would vote out the offending provisions.
The first successful mass women's campaigns were in South Australia (legislation passed in 1892) and New Zealand, where on 19 September 1893, adult women won the right to vote
Susan Magarey, the leading historian of Australian women's suffrage has looked into the differing views of early feminist groups on the suffrage question. Here, in an extract from her "Passions of the First wave Feminists" (UNSW Press, 2001) she looks at the passage of the South Australian and Commonwealth legislation.
Votes for women
1894
It is 17 December 1894, a Monday, close to the date of the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere. The House of Assembly in South Australia is debating the second reading of the Constitution Act Amendment Bill - legislation that could give votes to women. This is the eighth measure proposing female enfranchisement that the South Australian Parliament has considered. The debates on this day are the culmination of nine years of strenuous and concentrated campaigning.
This Bill is the first that has not been encumbered with an array of proposals either to restrict women's access to the vote, or to use the question of whether or not to enfranchise women in a distinct - though related - campaign to increase or diminish democratic citizenship among men. Earlier provisions attached to female suffrage bills proposed that the suffrage be extended only to women who were single or widows, not to married women, whose rights were held to be subsumed in those of their husbands; that the vote be granted only to women over the age of 25; or only to those women who owned enough property that, had they been men, such ownership would have qualified them to vote in elections for the Legislative Council, for which the property qualification for voters remained until the 1970s. All of these cautions indicated both the radical nature of the legislative measure under consideration, and the widespread doubt that the majority of women - wives - would be capable of exercising the privilege that their husbands had had since 1857. The provisions about property qualifications were concerned not so much with women's reasoning capabilities as with conservative efforts to shore up the power of those who owned property against the threats of the new-born labour party and its allies in the small 'l' liberal ministry of Charles Cameron Kingston. A final provision, that the whole question be submitted to a referendum, defeated a similar Bill in the previous year. But this one, the 1894 Bill, at last, has none of these restrictions. And it has been introduced as a government measure.
Outside the Parliament, an array of organisations gather - from the Woman Suffrage League to the Algermeiner Deutscher Verein; from the Trades and Labor Council to the Women's Christian Temperance Union; from the Single Tax League and the district Sociological Classes ('sociology' was often seen as both political and progressive at this time) to the Working Women's Trade Union; from the South Australian Fabian Society to the Society for the Study of Christian Sociology. All have been holding meetings, enrolling supporters, writing to the press, arranging deputations to members of the Government, all supporting votes for women.
In August 1894, a stalwart supporter carried into the Parliament a 'monster' petition in favour of women's suffrage. It bears no fewer than 11,600 signatures. Like the petition that John Stuart Mill presented to the House of Commons in 1866, this one is a great roll, 400 feet in length, and the number of signatures it contains is only 2,500 fewer than those that the English suffragists had mustered from a vastly larger population. A counter-petition, presented by the 'liquor interest' - fearing that the WCTU's involvement meant that votes for women would bring in prohibition - managed only 2,000 signatures.
On this date, 17 December 1894, women have deluged members of parliament with telegrams, and have crowded into the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Assembly to hear the final third-reading debate. Rose Birks, in her capacity as honorary secretary of the Woman Suffrage League, has arranged to bring with her for the afternoon that 'Grand Old Woman of South Australia', Catherine Spence, fresh off the boat after a year of lecturing and attending meetings across the United States of America, through Britain, and in Europe (all of which were the subject of reports that Spence sent to the Adelaide press). Miss Spence met such renowned suffrage campaigners as Susan B. Anthony in the United States and Millicent Garrett Fawcett in England. Parliamentarians take time out from their duties to come and greet her and she takes the opportunity to urge the women's suffrage cause. The debate proceeds.
Later in the afternoon, the women leave the Parliament to hold a brief, tense, meeting of the Woman Suffrage League, and then proceed to the Cafe de Paris in Rundle Street, where they are having a party to welcome Catherine Spence home. Always perceptive, Miss Spence notes that Mary Lee is miffed that she, Spence, should be gaining so much attention at this moment, a moment for which Mary Lee has campaigned with all of her very considerable skills and energy, to say nothing of her impatience. Always diplomatic, Catherine Spence calms her down, involving her in the speechifying which, while it is ostensibly about welcoming Miss Spence back from her travels, is really about showing the extent and weight of support for the Bill under discussion little more than a block away. They drown out conversation at the table of a parliamentarian nearby.
The party breaks up. The principal speech-makers - Mary Lee; Elizabeth Webb Nicholls, president of the Suffrage Division of the WCTU; Rose Birks - and a host of their friends troop back down King William Street to the Parliament, heels ringing on the pavement. The South Australian Chronicle reported:
Ladies poured into the cushioned benches to the left of the Speaker, and relentlessly usurped the seats of the gentlemen who had been settled there before. They filled the aisles here, and overflowed into the gallery to the right, while some of the bolder spirits climbed the stairs and invaded the rougher forms behind the clock.
The House is packed, more than it has ever been before. 'So,' reported the chivalrous Chronicle, 'there was a wall of beauty at the southern end of the building, and the standard of legislative eloquence was raised sympathetically.' Eloquent they might have been, but they are not winning this night. The Bill's opponents are trying to talk it out, the Government is waiting for the moment when it will have the numbers for the two-thirds majority necessary for a constitutional amendment. The hours pass. The eloquence grows tired. The women wait, still tense. It is past midnight - after the trams have stopped running - before it becomes clear that the vote will not be taken this night. The women and their supporters make their way home to restless and anxious nights. For, as one of those supporters wrote later, 'No-one, looking at the final figures, would have any conception of the intensity of the struggle, of the manifold difficulties overcome, nor of the fact that the issue was doubtful till within twelve hours of the final vote.'
That is taken on the morning of 18 December 1894. 'The Ayes were sonorous and cheery,' reported the Adelaide Observer, 'the Noes despondent like muffled bells.' The count shows 31 in favour, and only 14 against. The House resounds to cheers. And to grudging jibes from the opposition benches: 'Not half of you will get back,' yells one; 'It's a regular hen convention,' sneers another, waving his arms towards the government benches.
On the morning of this momentous decision, South Australia's principal daily appeared on the streets and breakfast tables announcing that female suffrage was, essentially, about sex, and sexual difference.
We have always urged that the fundamental question is the sexual one. Regard women as a class, and there is no argument worthy of a moment's examination in favour of denying them the suffrage. Regard them as a sex, with an appropriate sphere of sexual activity into which voting and sitting in Parliament - the two things are complementary - cannot be intruded without injuriously deranging normal sexual relations, and the whole aspect of the question completely changes.
But the vote taken a few hours later made it clear that for the majority of parliamentarians in the South Australian legislature, the feminists' campaigns had succeeded. Women were no longer to be regarded 'as a sex'. 'Normal sexual relations' would have to take their chances. Women were to have the vote; they were political subjects, just as men were.
Indeed, under this legislation, they could sit in the parliament as well. This was an extension of their campaign that they had not asked for. The constitution of the Woman Suffrage League explicitly stated that 'no claim is put forward for the right to sit as representatives', though the WCTU Convention, meeting in Adelaide in 1893, considered such a provision 'unnecessary and offensive'. This right - which set South Australia at the forefront of the world for more than a decade - resulted from an attempt to wreck the Bill. In August 1894, opposition to the suffrage Bill had been growing desperate. One of its opponents was Ebenezer Ward, South Australia's 'silver tongue', a man who had been sued for divorce by his first wife in 1866, was to be taken to court by his second wife in 1895 for failing to support her and their nine children adequately, and would arrive in the Legislative Council to oppose the Married Women's Protection Bill in 1896 so drunk that he could not read the statement on the paper in front of him. During the debates on women's suffrage, on 16 August 1894, he moved that the second clause of the suffrage Bill - excluding women from sitting in parliament - be struck out. But this attempt to make the Bill unacceptable to the Lower House failed. The amendment was carried.
This legislation also had an extension which the legislators did not shirk. Just as legislation in 1856, granting manhood suffrage and one man-one vote, had, at least in principle, included Aboriginal men, so too did the legislation of 1894 include Aboriginal women. In 1896, Point McLeay, an Aboriginal reserve near the mouth of the Murray River, had its own polling station with more than 100 people on the rolls, and 70 per cent of them voted in the election that year.
In 1894 then, neither questions of race nor exaggerations of the demand made for equality of the sexes could distract the legislators and the women lobbying them. The legislation giving votes to women was about rendering justice to women, recognising them as human beings, not as lesser beings, as members of 'the sex'. Less than a decade later, it was a very different story.
1902
The second legislation to be considered here was debated in the elegant, if unfinished, Houses of Parliament in Melbourne, where the new Commonwealth Parliament met until it moved to the chilly hill-station on the banks of the Molonglo River that became Canberra in 1927. The Victorian Parliament had been banished to the Exhibition Buildings. In April 1902, the new Commonwealth parliamentarians debated the Commonwealth Franchise Bill - for the meetings of the Federal Convention which drew up the constitution for the new government had achieved only temporary agreement on the question of who would be entitled to vote for the members of its Parliament.
There had been several differences between the franchise established for the parliament of each colony. There were differences over plural voting, which allowed a man who owned property in more than one electorate to cast a vote in each. There were differences over the proportion of members of the Upper House who were nominated by the local representative of the British crown and the proportion who were elected, and over the property qualifications of those who could vote for members of an Upper House. There were differences over the entitlement of Aboriginal Australians to the vote. After 1894, of course, there were also differences over votes for women.
The clause concerned with the franchise submitted to the meeting of the Federal Convention in Adelaide in 1897 (No 29) had dealt with plural voting by providing that 'each elector shall have only one vote', but had then proposed simply that the suffrage for elections to the Federal Parliament should be the same in each state as the suffrage for the Lower House in each colony's Parliament - until the Federal Parliament ruled otherwise. South Australian members of the Convention had sought a revision to that clause that would enfranchise all women over the age of 21. When that was defeated (p.725), largely by objections that such a provision would force those states which had not enfranchised women to do so, Frederick Holder - a former Premier and member of the South Australian Kingston ministry which had brought in the successful women's suffrage Bill of 1894 - had moved swiftly to add another provision: that 'no elector now possessing the right to vote shall be deprived of that right' (p.725). That provision had finally been accepted (p.732), though only after William Arthur Trenwith MLA had quietly threatened that the women of South Australia might well vote against federation if there were any possibility that it would deprive them of 'the privilege for which they have struggled' (p.727).
By 1902, the newest of the settler colonies, Western Australia, had also passed legislation giving votes to women, in 1899, although it had not provided for women to sit in parliament. Bills to enfranchise women had been passed by the Lower Houses of New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria, although they had all been thrown out in the Upper Houses. But their success in the popular chambers, coupled with feminist campaigns - circularising candidates for the first elections to the Federal Parliament asking if they favoured a uniform franchise, and subsequent petitions for votes for women to the new legislature - had imparted a sense of inevitability to the direction of the debate. Many of the speakers protested, in well-worn terms, against the prospect of enfranchising women. But, as one Western Australian senator, Stanniforth Smith, observed:
There is no doubt that womanhood suffrage is certain to become co-extensive with the civilised world. The only question is at what date it will come. Sydney Smith mentions a mythical dame of the name of Mrs Partington, who endeavoured with a broom to sweep back the Atlantic. I am very much afraid that there are a great many Dame Partingtons at the present day, each with a broom ... composed of prejudice and conservatism, [who] are endeavouring to sweep back the tide of democracy, and to prevent a simple act of justice like this being done. (c11,485)
The Bill passed through both houses before the month was out (cc 11,369, 3 April 1902); 11,984 (24 April 1902). But it had been subjected to one extremely important change. The Bill introduced into the Senate would have enfranchised Aboriginal Australians, female and male, as well as non-Aboriginal women. Settler-Australian parliamentarians observed that their colonial legislatures had long since acknowledged the right of Aboriginal men to vote. They noted, too, that colonial precedents had given Aboriginal women the right to vote, and to sit in parliament as well, following the South Australian legislation, and the determination of the 1897 Federal Convention. But by 1902, following the federation of the colonies and territories into the new Commonwealth of Australia, there was a new consciousness of nation and a new rhetoric of nationalism. Amid this, a majority of the Commonwealth parliamentarians had developed strong objections to the racial dimensions of such extensions of democracy. It was the 'thin red thread of kinship' that, in the view of English-born federation-maker Henry Parkes, bound the settler colonists into a 'new' Australian nation. That kinship was defined by skin colour. Australian 'kin', wherever they came from, had to be 'white'. The franchise for the new nation could be made in-clusive in terms of sex precisely because Anglo-Celtic women could be defined as 'kin'. And that definition of 'kinship' simultaneously ex-cluded Aboriginal Australians, as well as any other possible non-kin members of the new nation. The Commonwealth Franchise Act that was passed in June 1902 - only months after the passage of legislation introducing the infamous 'White Australia' policy for immigration, the first Act passed by the new Australian Parliament - simultaneously enfranchised all 'white' women and men, and entitled both to sit in the Commonwealth Parliament, and disenfranchised all 'black' people, women and men alike.
The exclusion of non-whites - of the racially or ethnically different - served, temporarily, to eradicate the differences of sex between Anglo-Celtic women and Anglo-Celtic men. Citizenship, as defined by the right to vote, could be sexually inclusive, because it had just been made racially and ethnically exclusive. The Other of the citizen of the new Australian nation was defined by skin colour, rather than by sex-specific reproductive capacities.
The paradox was, though, that such inclusiveness carried within itself the seeds of its own demise, for being included in the new nation - accorded the rights of citzenship - harnessed the new white women citizens to a nationalist agenda in which it was their sex - their reproductive capacities - which would become their most important contribution to the nation. And this was one important factor which spelled the end of the goals around which the Woman Movement arose and crystallised.
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Rio Tinto's non-union agreement campaign was all that we had come to expect from an organization that had pioneered union busting in this country in the early 1990's and whose executives had gone on to many other Australian companies to further the sophisticated strategies they first ran in the Pilbara district of WA. The s170LK campaign by Rio was aimed at trying to flee the new and fairer state IR laws that were being proposed by the state Labor government. Laws which would attack the command and control system Rio had so effectively implemented at all of it's WA sites through the use of workplace agreements. The s170LK agreements were no more than a mirror of what they had achieved through workplace agreements at the state level.
By Tuesday lunchtime on March 5th, the day after the WA Labour Day long weekend, Rio had hand delivered in excess of 3000 s170LK agreements to the homes of all of it's employees in WA. This was no mean feat given the sheer size of it's operations which stretched as far south to Perth for the fly in fly out workers to Carnarvon, through the Pilbara towns of Pannawonica, Paraburdoo, Tom Price, Karratha, Dampier, Wickham and Port Hedland and onto Kununurra in the far north. The vote was to cover workers from the Rio companies of Argyle Diamonds, Dampier Salt, Hamersley Iron and Robe River. In less than 5 hours the agreements were out and the 14 day count down for the ballot was on. All this achieved without a leak from anywhere that it was going to occur. The only inkling that something may be occurring was the all day management meetings that occurred through all their sites on the Friday before the Labour Day long weekend.
By Tuesday mid morning various union officials in the North West and Perth had begun to receive calls from different contacts at the Rio operations that these agreements were on the table. Calls between officials, Unions, the ACTU and UnionsWA resulted in a national phone hook up on Thursday morning where it was decided that we would mount a "No Vote" campaign against the s170LK agreement. That campaign was to start on Saturday March 9th . Thursday and Friday was spent putting together a pamphlet outlining the "No Vote" position which would be the only source of a united message for the first week. Our campaign was to be, by and large, a "third party" campaign because of the short lead time, the internal organization of Rio and the sheer distances that had to be covered in terms of the towns and worksites. This meant that we would conduct morning and afternoon public meetings in all of the towns and sites in the Pilbara and Carnarvon for the Rio companies of Dampier Salt, Hamersley Iron and Robe River. Argyle Diamonds would involve airport, Union office and home meetings in Perth because most of that workforce operates on a fly in fly out basis. While Argyle still had some semblance of union structures there was no union structures at the other three companies at all. At these meeting we would also get out our pamphlet so it would go into the workplace.
The message we ran with the workers was that the Labor government was about to introduce new laws that would make the workplace fairer and Rio didn't want that. They wanted a continuation of the control they had in the workplace and were trying to move to the federal system to keep that. Workers should vote no to keep their options under the state system open. If they chose to do that they would lose nothing. Everything would stay as it is. We said they should be informed about what choices they made. Ours was simply an information campaign about what their options were. It was agreed that no officials were to try and recruit workers and most importantly we would present ourselves as a united front. Officials from all of the Unions (AMWU, AWU, CEPU and CFMEU), the ACTU and UnionsWA were involved as was a labour lawyer. Meetings were as much about questions, answers and listening as they were about getting out our clear and precise message. The presentation was as important as the message. These workers, given the recent history of the area, saw a united and coherent Union body delivering a precise and balanced alternative argument.
The first round of meetings took seven days and then we had one more round in the few days before the ballot opened. During the second round of meetings we got out a second flyer which was more of a question and answer pamphlet. This was to address more of the specific issues that had been raised in the first round of meetings and combat some of the company's propaganda. We also ran a number of advertisements in the local papers and through the local radio stations. We did letter drops in all of the towns as well as inserting flyers into the main local home delivered paper. Messages of support came from the workers at BHP. A letter from the local ALP member gave support to our position. At each of the meetings we held we also took a list of names and addresses for feedback and follow up. Given that these sites had been deunionised for 9 years now the turnouts were very good. In Tom Price we had just over 220 workers turnout and at Paraburdoo 200. Karratha and Dampier had 180 while Wickham we got 70. There were poor turnouts at Pannawonica and the two satellite sites.
What became quite clear as we travelled to the various towns was the amount of heart the workforce took from the successful rejuvenation of the union just up the road at BHP. Many were aware and others wanted to hear what had gone on at BHP to reorganise that company in the face of the same type of deunionisation campaign they had lost some 9 years before. All had friends or had read in the press of the fight back by BHP workers after the well resourced and sophisticated campaign by BHP. And how after nearly three years those workers were on the verge of a collective agreement that was going to deliver a secure future for them, their families and the communities in which they lived. They wanted that future for themselves.
In the first six days of Rio's campaign to get up the s170LK agreement the line they ran was that their workplace agreement system was a positive one for both them and their employees providing quite obvious mutual benefits for both parties. This was the public line they had been running since the inception of these agreements in their workplaces. What became quite apparent after our first round of meetings was that an informed workforce was going to cast a no vote in the vicinity of about 80%. These workers were not happy with the current workplace agreement regime and had major concerns around the fair treatment process, the performance review system, the manner in which the company made unilateral changes to hours and rosters, the lack of consultation about change and the all consuming power that management exercised on the job displaying a total lack of respect for the workforce which resulted in a management attitude of ... "if you don't like it here then fuck off because there's plenty more where you came from".
With everything pointing to a white wash "no" vote Rio changed it's tune and began to run a campaign based on fear and deceit in the last 5 days before the ballot. Workers were told, incorrectly, by their immediate supervisors that if they voted no they would lose their superannuation entitlements, bonus, medical benefits and education assistance for their children. They were also informed that they would have to go back to the 1987 rates of pay and would risk having their jobs contracted out. Quite a stark contrast to the manner in which they began the s170LK campaign.
Despite the above a courageous decision was taken by the majority with the "no" vote getting up at Hamersley Iron, Dampier Salt and Argyle Diamonds. Robe River was the only company to vote yes. This was the only place where we could only get to workers in one of the three sites. At Wickham, where we managed to visit and hold proper meetings, the no vote ran at about 70%.
While the result was promising we need to be clear about what it meant. The no vote said two things. Firstly it was a vote of no confidence in the individual contract system. Secondly it was these workers choosing to explore their options under the new fairer laws being proposed by the state Labor government. It was not a vote to move to the union. But it does present the union movement with an unprecedented opportunity to assist these workers to reorganise, and therefore gain some dignity and respect in their workplace.
Will Tracey is a joint organiser for 5 unions in the Pilbara working on BHP for the past 18 months and Rio Tinto since the 5th March. In one 18 day period, Will travelled over 10,000 kilometres.
by Tara de Boehmler
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But for one of its characters (Lena, played by Dannielle Hall), the destination is very important. It must fulfill a lifelong dream to establish a relationship with her estranged father while leading her to a place offering more choices than the mission she has grown up in.
She instinctively knows that whatever path she chooses to take her there will potentially be paved with difficulties and realises it will be her handling of these situations which will determine where she ultimately ends up.
At least this appears to be the thinking that shapes Lena's journey from her Northern NSW mission to the city of Sydney where her long lost father lives.
What drives her to leave is as much a desire to know her father as it is an attempt to escape from a place where a distinct lack of available choices leaves few options other than crime and alcoholism. When her best friend becomes pregnant like so many girls around their age Lena decides to leave at once, while she still has the freedom.
Along the way she meets Vaughn, a young Aboriginal man who is also heading to Sydney. Vaughn (played by Damian Pitt) has escaped from a detention centre to come and visit his dying mother.
He is a young man who has had the hope knocked out of him and whose resultant coping mechanism is to hold in the pain while lashing out with violence when provoked. His dreams are undeveloped and with habitual knee-jerk reactions replacing well-considered choices, Lena holds little hope that Vaughn has what it takes to dig himself out of his hole.
Despite her misgivings about Vaughn's personal situation, she confidently tells him that no matter how shitty anyone's life is, they always have a choice to live a better life.
Lena was born to an Aboriginal mother and an Irish father, leaving her with skin pale enough for her to pass as white. So when she talks of choices, in Vaughn's eyes, it is clear that she was born with a few more than he was.
But her words have an impact on him and bring him to examine his own actions and the consequences he might be attracting to himself. The exercise brings him a new perspective but it is no magic wand.
Sen's Beneath Clouds is a subtle movie in which more is often said in the scenes containing the least words. In one such scene Vaughn is admiring some wild horses in the back of a truck. He is entranced as they stare back at him with their soulful eyes. Suddenly the vehicle begins to move. Vaughn reads on the side of the truck that they are being taken to a meat works. They have no say, no voice, no choice and no hope of a future.
It is like he has been trying to tell Lena all along: when living in a white dominated world, at the mercy of white laws and the white version of history and reality, what choice does he really have? And what chance do either of them have to triumph on their own terms when racism is so ingrained on either side of the apparent black/white divide?
Beneath the Clouds depicts a journey where two people endeavor to find out just that.
Three out of five stars. (Go your own way)
by David Peetz
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But perhaps we should reflect on whether a grave error was in fact made when this happened...
DID WE MAKE A BIG MISTAKE?
by David Peetz
Did we make a big mistake
When women got the vote?
Since then there's been a litany
Of problems we can quote.
We've seen disasters sweep the globe -
There's world wars one and two,
Plagues of poverty run wild,
Wealth held by just a few.
Displaced peoples turned away,
Folk jailed for speaking out,
Communities all broken up
By markets' heavy clout.
Did we make a big mistake?
It's not the time for gloating.
Was it the greatest goof of all
To let men keep on voting?
He was at it again this week; refusing to mediate a damaging dispute at BHP Steel where desperate workers were fighting for their jobs because they were in technical breach of his anti-worker industrial laws.
It's a neat fait accompli - bludgeon through changes to the federal legislation transforming the federal IR system from a forum of compromise and conciliation to an industrial jungle; then watch the feathers fly.
The great untold story of the Reith-Abbott reforms is how the AIRC's jurisdiction to resolve disputes has been weakened to near irrelevancy, while major disputes are sent to the more confrontational and costly jurisdiction of the federal Court.
So instead of have a system where settlements to disputes can be nutted out; we have a punitive regime where workers are punished for taking a stand. And all the while, Abbott can accuse them of being 'law-breakers'.
He was running a similar tact on federal-state relations, attempting to rewrite the constitutional split in the name of the Rule of Law by with-holding federal funds for the Commonwealth Games project in Melbourne unless his federal OEA was allowed to go snooping around the building sites.
While Steve Bracks stared him down, Abbott's now floating the bizarre proposal that all federal funding be linked to his goons being given access to sites to impose their Freedom from Association rules. All in the name of the Rule of Law.
But Abbott's affair with the Rule of Law is anything but consistent. When it comes to workplace relations, he firmly believes employers should not be tied to any legal responsibilities.
Take the unfair dismissal laws, which Abbott sees as an unnecessary burden on employers; or the push to have universal paid maternity leave, which he believes should be a matter for individual businesses, not a general law.
Even his Royal Commission is full of inconsistencies. It's been sent out to expose allegations of breaches of Abbott's Freedom of Association laws - while conveniently turning a blind eye to endemic breaches of immigration, taxation and safety laws.
And even Abbott's own advocate, is excused of legal breaches, such bas the promotion of pattern AWAs, the individual contracts that are designed to wipe out the award system and replace them with a new subsistence set of rights.
It all comes down to the Tory furphy that 'workplace relations should be decided in the workplace": code for "let's allow the employer to exert their inherent power to screw their workers."
There's a gross double-standard operating here. When the rules exist to protect workers rights and they surplus to requirement; when they exist to limit workers' rights to assert themselves they are important principles that must be upheld.
When Abbott talks of the Rule of Law, it pays to be skeptical; the gulf between law and justice has never been wider.
Peter Lewis
Editor
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The ACTU commissioned some focus group work recently, from which I received some sobering news. After two years as ACTU Secretary I am recognised more by my spectacles than for the issues I have publicly argued.
I can take some heart though. After seventeen eventful years in the job my predecessor Bill Kelty was still better known for his unruly hair.
With this in mind I thought I would begin today by telling you a bit about myself - how I came to be in this position and what I am committed to doing.
I grew up in Rooty Hill, in the western suburbs of Sydney, until my father died when I was a teenager. He was a winemaker for Penfolds, a craft which had been handed down from father to son since the first Combet migrated from France.
My mother's antecedents were mainly Italians who settled in north-east NSW. They were Country Party people, but my father's lot were Labor.
After leaving school I worked for a year, then studied Mining Engineering. This took me to Wallerawang Colliery near Lithgow, and at 19 I started to learn about unionism when I joined the Miners' Federation.
I completed my studies, but by that time I had decided to work for the labour movement.
Like lots of young people I tried my hand at different things - I worked for community organisations, informed myself about economics and politics. I gained a lot of workplace experience while working for several years with unions on occupational health and safety.
When the Waterside Workers' Federation offered me job in 1987, I had little idea that I was about to confront a very steep learning curve. I was the first industrial officer employed by the union since the early 1950s. The union was just a tad behind the times, but they recognised that change was coming.
During the six years I was at the WWF we dealt with a commission of inquiry, a radical restructuring of the industry, the redundancy of half the workforce, the renegotiation of every work practice and employment condition, an amalgamation with the Seamens' Union to create the MUA, plus a few disputes and union elections thrown in.
Fortunately, respect for some important traditions were upheld, like the occasional long lunch.
I was greatly influenced by the culture of the WWF, which was industrially tough but pragmatic, and I retain a deep affection for my colleagues and the union.
I started at the ACTU in late 1993, at a time of dramatic change in industrial relations. Ninety years of centralised wage fixing had been replaced by enterprise bargaining.
My early years at the ACTU took me to the negotiating table in many industries, and I developed relationships with people on both the union and employer side of the table.
It helped me appreciate the commercial imperatives confronting many businesses in an open economy, as well as the impact this has on working people and their families.
My time at the ACTU has also involved me in the totemic industrial disputes of the last eight or nine years.
Waterfront Dispute A Turning Point
Principal amongst these disputes was the gripping 1998 waterfront struggle against Patrick Stevedoring and the Government. This was a vicious, high-stakes confrontation which tested many of us to the limit, and which took me into a more public role.
I am proud that in the resolution of the dispute we achieved every single objective we had set ourselves - principal amongst which was defeating the corporate restructuring which tried to rob 2000 people of their jobs and their entitlements.
Had the Howard Government succeeded in crushing the MUA it would have inflicted a demoralising blow against unions and working people in this country. The Government failed.
Instead the waterfront dispute has become something of a turning point for unions and their members.
New leadership and confidence has emerged. Unions have begun the process of rebuilding following years of membership decline. We are shifting attention to the contemporary concerns of working people.
And we have successfully campaigned against each subsequent attempt by the Howard Government to wind back workers' rights in the Parliament or in the field.
In a nutshell, unions have started implementing a plan for the future.
Modern Context For Union Strategy
To explain contemporary union strategy I need to touch upon the changes which have transformed industrial relations in Australia over the last five to ten years.
There have been three key dynamics - political change, the shift from centralised wage fixing to enterprise bargaining, and the economy.
These powerful dynamics have demanded a complete rethink of union organisation, policy and tactics.
Political Change
Political change at the national level has had a significant effect on unions. Australian unions had a lot invested in the Accord with the Hawke and Keating Governments.
When the Howard Government was elected in 1996, and set about attacking unions and employee rights, we had to identify alternative means of influencing public policy.
Employer attitudes also hardened in response to political and commercial pressures. There is now a heightened hostility to unions in many workplaces.
These changes have led not only to new tactics, but also reconsideration of our political relationships.
The current debate about the ALP-union relationship, for example, should not be understood simply as an expression of Simon Crean's desire to modernise Labor. It also represents a long-overdue opportunity for unions to redefine their relationship with Labor in a post-Accord environment.
The Impact Of Enterprise Bargaining
The second dynamic I identified, the change from centralised wage determination to enterprise bargaining, has involved a dramatic departure from decades of compulsory arbitration.
Pay and employment conditions are now fundamentally a product of bargaining power at the workplace. Only 23% of workers rely upon minimum wages set by the award system, and they are paid only 12% of the national wages bill.
Enterprise bargaining has taken unions out of the industrial tribunals and into tens of thousands of workplaces. Where we once needed court room advocates we now need workplace campaigners.
This alone has been a big challenge, but it is the transformation of the economy that has impacted the most on unions and employees.
Economic Change
Over the last 10 years Australia has experienced a historic combination of economic expansion, low inflation, high productivity and structural change.
GDP growth has averaged 4.7% per year for 10 years, which has added $200 billion to the economy in real terms. Australia's growth far outstripped the G7, OECD and European average.
The economy has accommodated 1.6 million extra jobs.
Average earnings have increased by 4.1% a year over ten years, and we recently overtook Germany and Japan in GDP per capita.
Strong growth has been sustained despite some dramatic external shocks - a recession in Japan, the Asian economic crisis, and September 11 to name a few.
These features are some of the positive elements of the engagement of the Australian economy with the world.
But the statistics conceal the character of the change which is taking place, and how it is impacting upon people. Many people and regions are not sharing in the benefits of prosperity, and inequality is in fact widening.
The key impact of economic change for unions has been membership loss.
A lot ill-informed comments have been made about the reasons for declining union membership in the 1980s and 1990s.
The simple fact is that economic change, and particularly the transition to a services based workforce, has been the key reason that membership has fallen.
Employment fell during the 80s and 90s in almost every part of the workforce where union membership has historically been high.
Just think of Ansett, bank branch closures, the shut down of manufacturing and steel plants, the dismembering of the CES, and you start to get the picture.
Hundreds of thousands of union members have been downsized, contracted-out, casualised and privatised. Union officials have been professional redundancy negotiators.
At the same time employment has expanded in new areas where unions have traditionally had little presence. In call centres, for example, job numbers grew by 12% during 2001 alone, to reach 225,000 employees.
There trends have been experienced by unions in other advanced economies.
The Need For An Organisational Response
In the lead up to my election as ACTU Secretary I reflected upon these issues at some length. In late 1999, with the support of my colleague Sharan Burrow and other senior leaders, the ACTU set out an agenda for change in a report titled unions@work.
We argued that, to meet our objective to lift the living standards of working families, and improve the quality of working life, unions must build collective bargaining power at the workplace.
To do so required unions to be more relevant to the aspirations and concerns of workers and their families than ever before - we clearly had to develop stronger grass roots support.
The report also argued that to grow unions needed to organise employees in the growth sectors of the economy - areas like telecommunications and call centres, health services, hospitality, casinos and tourism.
To be more effective advocates for employees, we said that new communications and campaign tactics were needed, such as using corporations law - something we did successfully in the courts in the Patrick's dispute, in our shareholder campaign against Rio Tinto, and more recently during the Ansett administration.
The unions@work report represented a major shake-up.
It involved significant changes in how unions operate, in the allocation of staff and resources, the skills that are needed, and the relationship of the union with people in the workplace.
Union Successes
Significant progress has been made, but there's a long way to go. We are only two years into a five to ten year program. Some examples will help illustrate what is happening.
In NSW the shop employees union has defeated an attempt by corporate giants Westfield and AMP to make retail workers pay for car parking at their workplaces - shopping centres.
The average before tax income of a retail employee in NSW is only $262 per week. Most are young, female and part-time. The cost to them of car parking fees would have been more than 2 weeks pay, in the case of most working mothers almost 3 weeks pay.
In the past the union would likely have dealt with this by seeking arbitration. Instead the union commissioned polling of employee attitudes, initiated petitions, involved employees in lobbying and campaign events, built community support, and won.
Councils in both Warringah and Liverpool have unanimously rejected applications by the companies. AMP has withdrawn an appeal to the Land and Environment Court. Union membership has increased. Even the Federal MP in Warringah, none other than Tony Abbott, got on board.
The Transport Workers' Union is also trying new tactics and winning. When tax changes were mooted affecting self-employed couriers many of them faced a 20% increase in their tax bill.
These people typically work 12 to 16 hours a day for around $40,000 per year. The TWU provided a forum for people to get together, developed with them a campaign strategy, worked the issue onto talk-back radio, and supported seven courier drivers who walked in protest from Sydney to Canberra.
In Canberra they were joined by 700 couriers in a convoy stretching 5 kilometres. The campaign was won, and union membership amongst courier owner drivers has never been higher.
One of the keys to this success has been a change in the approach of the union to the owner driver status of the couriers - in the past we have felt hamstrung by the legal distinction between employees and owner drivers.
Unions are also running broad campaigns which benefit all workers. We have built the protection of employee entitlements into a major political and industrial issue over the last few years.
It is no small achievement that, after stumbling from one ad hoc scheme to another, the Government has been forced to guarantee all annual and long service leave, unpaid wages and 8 weeks redundancy pay.
In Ansett alone this represents about $320 million of workers money that we have saved. However, we will press on in our campaign until we achieve 100% protection.
As part of our renewal strategy the ACTU is also seeking to rebuild relationships with business. The most celebrated series of disputes over the past decade has been between unions and Rio Tinto, formerly CRA, over the issue of individual contracts.
In the last two years a dialogue with the company has settled a $70 million damages suit brought against the unions in the early 1990s, and resolved long running battles in the coal industry. In recent weeks an agreement has been struck which will see Rio Tinto pay $25 million in compensation to several hundred coal miners.
I see the development of relationships such as this as critical - relationships which sensibly reconcile commercial imperatives with respect for collective bargaining and employee rights.
Membership Growth
Specific campaign successes such as I have described also add to encouraging signs at the national level.
For the first time in about 20 years there have been two successive years of growth in union membership. Unions now represent over 1.9 million members. The growth is small so far, but a very positive indicator.
Even more encouraging is the data showing that we are growing where jobs are growing - amongst casual and part-time employees, women, and in private sector service industries such as hospitality and retail.
In fact, a typical unionist today is just as likely to be a female shop assistant or nurse, perhaps even a journalist, as well as a male construction worker or tradesman.
And the fact that union membership is high in two of the biggest single workplaces in Australia, where the average age of about 10,000 employees is in the mid 20s - the Sydney and Melbourne casinos - demonstrates that young people will join unions.
And if you look at union representation more broadly, we consistently look after a much wider constituency than our direct membership. Well over 5 million people are members of industry super funds, we bargain for members and non-members alike, and our test cases benefit all.
A New Policy Agenda
Union renewal also involves the development of new policies. People fundamentally join unions if it helps them achieve their individual goals - a better living standard and an improved quality of working life.
This is why the ACTU and many unions have undertaken extensive research of employee attitudes. Our research demonstrates that the intensification of work is the hot-button issue.
It is evident that economic prosperity has not produced satisfaction at work.
The foundation for economic prosperity has been reduced staffing, higher workloads, longer working hours, less security, more stress, casual jobs, low pay and an assault on family life.
In this hard working environment many people feel unappreciated by their employer, and frustrated with their life away from work. One person in our research summed it up this way - 'work ate my life'.
One untold consequence of Australia's economic success is that people are too tired for sex. Perhaps this is just part of John Howard's master social plan - the third term agenda we're all looking for.
Another untold story is that, for all occupations other than managers and professionals, the net increase in jobs during the 1990s consisted entirely of part-time casual jobs (Borland, Gregory and Sheehan 2001).
Because they were casual jobs nearly 30% of the workforce now has no right to paid sick leave or annual leave, and no job security past the next shift.
The fact is that 87% of the net jobs created during the 90s paid less than $26,000 per year. An incredible 48% paid less than $15,600 per year. Middle income jobs actually declined.
No wonder that ABS figures released last week showed that 2 million households are experiencing severe financial stress. Many are working families unable to have a holiday, buy new clothes, pay bills on time, or go out. 195,000 households go without meals from time to time.
The Future of Work
The distorted impact of economic change demands a new debate about the future of work. People do not believe that the current pressures can be sustained.
Wealth creation should not lead to greater inequality, working poverty, insecurity and diminished quality of family life.
As a society we need to ensure that prosperity delivers better social outcomes. We should start by discussing the model of work and family life we would like in the future.
The Government has vacated any debate about the future of work.
The ACTU doesn't hold all the answers, but we are working hard on a range of issues.
I will touch on just a few.
Working Time
Tomorrow the ACTU will present its' final submissions in the first test case on working hours in over fifty years.
The case aims to help by putting excessive hours, excessive workloads, health and safety concerns, and work-family balance on the agenda in the workplace. If successful, it will help employees and employers develop more reasonable working time arrangements.
You cannot overstate how deeply felt this issue is in many workplaces. It is flaring up everywhere. It was, for example, the subject of a major nursing dispute in Victoria last year.
The issue of staff to patient ratios, and the consequent quality of health care the nurses could provide, was sufficient to mobilise thousands of nurses across the state in one of the most significant disputes for many years.
I was at one mass meeting and it was as passionate as any meeting I have ever attended. The nurses won.
Family Support
Policies which support families are also a key to the future of work.
Paid maternity leave is long overdue. Many couples have no choice but to work, and paid maternity leave will provide help at a crucial time.
But it needs to be backed up by a wider approach to family leave -to allow parents a longer period of unpaid parental leave, time off to care for sick kids, flexibility to cope with school holidays, and a right to switch between full time and part time work when it is needed.
Addressing Inequality
Inequality and low pay is also a key focus of ACTU work. Recently we broke through with an $18 rise for people on minimum wages - the largest increase in the minimum award rate for 20 years.
But to make a real difference to inequality requires changes to the tax and social security systems.
Carefully targeted tax or social security relief for low-income households is urgently needed, as a complement to decent minimum wage increases.
I was recently in Great Britain and had a look at the system of tax credits implemented by the Blair Government - which by the way has already implemented 26 weeks paid maternity leave as well as rights for working parents to choose flexible hours of work.
British Labour has used tax credits to supplement minimum wages and guarantee a minimum total income for families.
You will hear more from the ACTU about targeted tax or social security relief for low paid workers in the months ahead. We want to make it a key political issue.
Political Relationships
The uneven distribution of Australia's prosperity, and the impact of work intensification, demand a response from Government and policy makers.
In times of rapid change, I believe it to be the role of Government to ensure that people are not left behind, that the society is guided by fair and just outcomes.
The Howard Government is failing to do this.
It maintains it's political edge by focussing on issues which divide its' opponents, and by exploiting widely felt insecurity or intolerance.
This is both a challenge and an opportunity for the ALP.
For Labor I think it requires the articulation of a program which continues to promote strong economic growth, but which is underpinned by credible commitments to improving social and economic fairness and opportunity.
This is how the current debate about the relationship between unions and Labor must be understood. Unions created the Labor Party, and have worked with it for over 100 years in the pursuit of social and economic justice.
The Accord was once the contemporary expression of this shared objective. A debate about its' replacement is overdue.
The debate needs to be more broadly focussed than the so called 60:40 representation of unions at some ALP conferences.
It is not the responsibility of the ACTU to decide this issue, it is fundamentally the responsibility of unions affiliated to the Labor Party.
Some have signalled support for the proposed change to 50:50, and some are understandably frustrated. They are frustrated because they perceive the proposed change as reflecting negatively on unions.
But it's important to keep in mind what Simon Crean himself has emphasised - that the relationship with unions will continue to be fundamental to Labor - that the debate needs to concentrate on the main game.
And the main game is policy - policies which benefit working families. At the end of the day policies based upon shared values and objectives will define the modern relationship between Labor and unions - not the 60:40 or a 50:50 rule.
I have touched upon some of the policies of interest to unions and to ordinary people today.
As the direction of Labor's policy program is set, as the pathway to Chifley's 'light on the hill' is remapped, I expect that a package of changes for the Labor Party will be worked through.
Conclusion
I would like to conclude by thanking you for the opportunity to outline the ACTU's thinking.
Unions are by no means a homogeneous group - in many ways we reflect the diversity of the society - but we do have a demonstrated capacity to unite behind a strategy and to achieve great things.
I want to harness this capacity to ensure that unions do their best for working people in the years ahead.
If I could do something out of the ordinary for me, and adapt an expression from John Howard, I would describe myself as a conviction unionist.
And I can assure you that I will put all of my conviction into the cause in which I so passionately believe.
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Greg opened his address at the National Press Club this week with the revelation that polling has revealed more people recognised him for his glasses than his industrial achievements. Later he confessed to Kerry O'Brien on the 7.30 Report that he was considering a change of image, although the exact look appeared to be open for negotiation.
We start that process inviting Workers Online readers to give Greg an online makeover. This is not to classify Greg as a Tool - it's just our technology is limited and we've had to convert the Shed for a week. Using our state of the art simulation tools, we want you to give Greg the look and feel to win the hearts and minds of his membership.
Personally, we have long been advocates that skinny side-burns and paisley shirts would give Greg the sort of hip-retro look that chrystallises unionism for us. But Greg gave a hint of his own preferences during the Press Club speech when he got down and dirty, taking industrial relations into the bedroom for the first time since Ernie Ecob passed his famous judgment on female shearers.
Combet moved to broaden the working hours agenda to the bedroom, with exhausted workers unable to partake in even the simplest pleasures. "One untold consequence of Australia's economic success is that people are too tired for sex," he said. "Perhaps this is just part of John Howard's master social plan - the third term agenda we're all looking for." Could we spice up the image my having our leader assume the gigolo look - a few gold chains and heaps of chest hair.
Anyway, give it your worst and we'll pick the top three and send them through to Greg,
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France has gone home from the World Cup without registering a win or scoring a goal, and the darky villain of the piece is the former Colony of Senegal.
I thought the World Trade Organisation was set up to put a stop to these kinds of things.
With player payments in Europe reaching sums that are usually associated with quantum physics it appears a shake out of the beautiful game in the Northern Hemisphere may be overdue. How much is Zidane worth again?
Italy struggled after it selected its side from some retirement home, while that giant of world football, Slovenia, appeared to be there merely for the free tickets.
Sepp Blatter, the man who makes Juan Antonio Samaranch look like some kind of free-thinking trotskyite, was fighting for his very survival in the lead up to this World Cup. At stake was the chance that an outsider may have been
elected to be grand Pooh-Bah of the round ball game. This outsider was a black man, a concept that left European football with mouths agape in shock.
Luckily the colonial order of things was maintained and Europe will continue to enjoy 15 of the 32 World Cup places on offer. This is important so that those dynamos of world football, like Belgium, Poland and Slovenia, can continue to strut their stuff on the world stage.
Part of Comrade Blatter's support came from our humble region of the world, Oceania. This was on the back of a bribe to give Oceania a qualification position of it's own for the World Cup. I think this is a furphy, and not even a very good one at that.
Australia, qualifying on the back of those powerhouse footballing nations of Tonga and American Samoa may get the easy ride into the world Cup it's dreamed of, but is it merely a case of going from the ridiculously difficult to the sublimely ridiculous?
If you hold up a map of the Eastern Hemisphere (east of what I hear you chuckle) you will notice that Australia has a remarkable proximity to this amazing concept called Asia.
You must remember Asia. It was that thing that Keating kept going on about.
Apparently it's why we got rid of him (I'm glad it had nothing at all to do with the fact that we spent the early nineties watching our living standards walk into a lift shaft).
Anyway, why not change the habits of a decade and send a positive signal to our neighbours by going and having a kick with them in the lead-up to the World Cup?
We can't be any more embarrassing than Saudi Arabia. I come to be pondering these mysteries as I continue to enjoy Les Murray's rolling vernacular during the rather fanatical and impressive presentation of the world game on SBS over recent weeks.
My only concern is that I can't for the life of me place Les Murray's accent. It's a sort of Northern European/Mediterranean/husky Australian drawl. Maybe Les is the first truly multicultural presence in this country?
I'd ask our great leader, Johnny Howard, but he will think I'm talking about the drop kick poet from Taree - and besides, my Vodaphone doesn't get reception up George Bush's arsehole, which apparently is where our great leader has been for the last week.
So any suggestions on the origins of Les Murray's accent would be gratefully received. Send your suggestions to mailto:[email protected]
The great thing about the World Cup is that it has provided a fantastic distraction from the ruling class with a racket in their hand, namely Wimbledon.
No doubt we are set for that clown who carries on like some coke addled loon, Lleyton Hewitt, being more brat-like than was perceived possible. The resulting backlash will be dismissed as so much tall poppy syndrome.
There's a reason why Australia has the tall poppy syndrome - it's to stop us being a nation of wankers. Sadly, it may be failing in that endeavour.
Phil Doyle - disputing the line umpires call.
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Brown Nose
Red Card to John Howard for his nauseating and dangerous brown nosing of the Bush bottom. On the very day that the US president shows he is fair dinkum about suspending individual rights by locking up a 31-year-old Latino - no visits, no charges, no lawyers, no time limits, all on the say-so of intelligence agencies, proven flawed - Howard praises the US as a bastion of democracy and individual rights.
Sure, there is the compulsory bow to his rural constituency, a gentle nudge over farm subsidies, but it is well camouflaged by insistence that at least the US isn't as bad as those football-loving Europeans.
Howard, following the Bush game plan, distances himself from supporting a new International Criminal Court in much the same way as he has distanced himself from the Kyoto Protocols. Both proposals were originally endorsed by his administration.
Right to Strike
Howard's support presumably, and logically, extends to US insistence that it has the right to unilaterally launch nuclear strikes against any country or organisation it wants.
Bush lays out the new doctrine at a Washington dinner attended by Howard, reinforcing his country's "right" to strike states or groups it says possess nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.
Neither Howard nor Bush comments on whether this "right" should be extended to other countries, given that the US has more of the hardware in question than all other nations put together.
Toxic Seas
Meanwhile, neither says boo about two ships, loaded to the gunnels with enough nuclear material to create, wait for it, 17 atomic bombs, about to start unescorted voyages between Japan and the UK.
The rest of us might think they would make a tasty target for international terrorists, who Bush and Howard insist have tentacles across the globe, but, no, apparently this is business and can't be interfered with.
The cargo is a consignment of mixed plutonium and uranium oxides, delivered by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd as waste from its Sellafield plant. Trouble is, BNFL bodgeyed their paper work and the Japanese have told the company to pick it up, take it home, redo the paperwork, then send it back.
Amongst obvious concerns are a) the fact that British and US intelligence agencies are currently scurrying around, trying to piece together information on alleged Al Queda plots to attack British and US shipping. Three men were arrested in connection with this inquiry on May 11; b) confirmation that one of the transporters, the Atlantic Osprey, caught fire on its last ocean-going voyage; and c) predictions that the vessels are most likely to make their journey through the Tasman Sea.
You would think that even if, like his hero, Howard didn't give a Round Rodent's Ringpiece about the rest of the world, he would at least be wary about the proposed route, particularly in light of a categorical warning from the west's definitive defence briefing. Jane's Foreign Report calls security for the vessels' trips "totally inadequate".
Full House
Johnny might be having a shocker but he pulls one back, against the odds, when his friends at the UNHCR rule that only 25 of the 244 asylum seekers screened on Nauru are genuine refugees. Then, just when he's off on his lap of honour, we find it's another own-goal. Nauruan leader Rene Harris describes Howard's election-driven Pacific Solution as a "Pacific Nightmare", intimating that promised cash inducements haven't materialised and suggesting that while it might have ensured Johnny held his place in the team, he fears the axe when the island's selection committee meets later in the year.
It's The Rules, Stupid
Meanwhile, former South African star Nelson Mandela adds his voice to the call for an international judicial system. Mandela, who knows a bit about prison life, visits convicted Lockerbie bomber, Baset al-Megrahi, serving 20 years in isolation.
He calls the Libyan's confinement in Glasgow's toughest prison "psychological persecution" and backs demands for another appeal. Mandela's workrate, outstanding for an 83-year-old, complements ringing criticism of the al-Megrahi conviction from a UN Observer appointed to monitor the case.
Fair go, if an outfit like FIFA can get more than 200 countries to play by an agreed set of rules and abide by one judicial system, why can't the pollies?
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Massive Hike in Executive Pay
The slice of the corporate pie delivered to American executives is spiralling out of control, with the average CEO now earning a whopping 450 times the average salary of a worker. That's up tenfold from 1973, when the average CEO earned 45 times more than the average worker. After more than a decade of munificent salary-and-stock packages, many of America's corporate chieftains are departing with big retirement packages, provoking anger among some worker and shareholder activists.
"We're seeing the most obnoxious compensation packages in history" at a time when fewer workers have guaranteed retirement income, said John Hotz, deputy director of the Pension Rights Centre, a non-profit consumer organisation. In 1978, about 38 per cent of US workers were covered by defined benefits plans, which gave them a certain level of retirement income, and about 18 per cent were covered by plans that required them to invest on their own for the future, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. By 1997, only 21 per cent of workers had guaranteed retirement incomes and 42 per cent participated in plans that required them to invest on their own. (Source: The Washington Post)
BHP Billiton Profits Drop as War Wages
As BHP-Biliton employs radical strike-breaking tactics in a dispute that threatens the local car industry, the global giant has seen its profit forecasts cut by analysts. BHP have used professional strike-breakers, helicopters and police to break the picket of 280 maintenance workers at its Hastings plant near Melbourne.
Meanwhile, analysts say sharp rises in the Australian dollar and South African rand has led brokers, such as Merrill Lynch, to cut its forecasts for BHP Billiton's 2001/02 net profit by 10 per cent to $US1.836 billion ($A3.194 billion). As well, investment bank UBS Warburg said foreign exchange movements were likely to see the resource giant's fourth quarter profit dip below $US100 million ($A174 million). (Source: The Australian)
Lowy Under World Trade Centre Fire
Australian billionaire Frank Lowy's Westfield empire is being viewed with suspicion by New York activists who fear he wants to build a mega shopping mall on the World Trade Centre site. His opponents went public this week, voicing their concerns to two leading American newspapers and on Australian radio. Westfield struck an $800 million deal last year for a 99-year lease of the Trade Centre's shopping complex.
The collapse of the towers last September 11 did not affect that deal. The question now is what should happen to the country's most emotional piece of real estate. It is a debate that squarely pits relatives of the dead, local residents and big business against each other. (Source: The Australian)
Investors Bail On Village
Disappointed investors have bailed out of Village Roadshow after the hotel and entertainment group decided to scrap its dividend scheme on ordinary shares. Investors wiped more than $61.3 million off the market capitalisation of the Melbourne-based group, which has three core businesses including film, radio and theme parks. Village shares lost 15 per cent, or 26 cents, to $1.47 on volume of two million. Chairman Robert Kirby moved to reassure the market and said the decision would underpin long term general financial flexibility within Village Roadshow. Village executives have come under fire after paying former chairman John Kirby $2.23 million last year as the company's shares tumbled 30 per cent and net profit for the year fell 27 per cent to $55 million. (Source: The Age)
Tobacco Company Fined For Youth Smoking
US tobacco giant RJ Reynolds has been ordered to pay almost $35 million dollars in fines for illegally trying to lure young smokers through cigarette advertisements. A court in the Californian city of San Diego fined the United States' second largest tobacco company for placing cigarette ads in magazines with a high percentage of readers aged between 12 and 17. The penalty comes just a month after a Los Angeles court fined the firm $26 million dollars for illegally handing out tens of thousands of free packets of cigarettes at events attended by children. (Source: ABC)
Australian Brand For Sale
Another well-known Australian brand is up for sale, with Kraft Foods one of several companies short-listed to buy the Rosella business from global food group Unilever.. Rosella carries such brands as Continental, Chicken Tonight, Raguletto and Five Brothers. Kraft, which is owned by US-based cigarette and food giant Philip Morris, is one of the companies tipped to show interest. The sale is part of Unilever's new "global path to growth" strategy, a key element of which is to focus on a reduced number of leading brands. This would see the Rosella label sold but its modern processing plant at Tatura in regional Victoria would be kept by Unilever. (Source: SMH)
Cloud Hangs Over Indian IT
The rattle of nuclear sabres over Kashmir has worried hundreds of Australian businesses that, seeking cheaper prices, have been using Indian software developers to build their applications and process their data. The list includes some of the country's biggest corporations and many medium-sized companies - including telstra and several large banks. In aggregate, Australian companies spend billions of dollars a year with big Indian software houses such as Infosys, Mastek and HCL (Hindustan Computing Ltd). Now they are bringing their expatriate people back home and wondering whether they should be either moving or backing up their IT support because of the risk of war. Analysts say Indonesia is mounting a serious challenge to India's dominance in low-cost IT outsourcing. (Source: SMH)
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